Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> And so, yesterday I discovered that since all our sites are now part of
> one domain, that means all the login scripts are jumbled up together.
> (Remind me... WHY are we embarking on this unecessary complexity?)
>
> Clearly I'm going to have to rename the UK ones to disambiguate them
> from the rest. However, while I'm looking around, I had a look at the
> logon scripts used by some of the other sites...
>
> Now, the UK uses 4 different logon scripts, depending on what you need
> access to. Each script is an MS-DOS batch file that looks something like
> this:
>
>    @ECHO OFF
>
>    NET USE J: \\uk-bigbox\department /persistent:no
>    NET USE R: \\uk-bigbox\results /persistent:no
>    NET USE M: \\uk-bigbox\management /persistent:no
>
> The longest login script is 7 lines long. Basically each group of people
> have access to more or fewer network drives, and when I create a user
> account, I set it to run the appropriate script at logon.
>
> I had a look at the script run by the people at HQ. JESUS CHRIST!! o_O
>
> Fact #1: It's VB. (!!) I didn't even know you could *do* that!
>
> Fact #2: It's 318 lines long. (!!!!!!)
>
> I don't even want to guess how long it takes these people to log in...
> Between starting up the entire VB subsystem and running several hundred
> lines of code through an interactive interpretter, it can't be very fast!
>
> As best as I can tell (I don't really comprehend VB), this script does
> the following:
>
> 1. Figure out if M$ Office is installed. (??)
> 2. Load the user's real name data out of Active Directory. (?!)
> 3. Reconfigure the User Name and Initials data in M$ Office (?!!!!)
> 4. Determine which security groups the user has been assigned to in
> Active Directory.
> 5. Iterate through that list, and call about 30 different subroutines
> based on group membership. (!!)
> 6. Each subroutine checks for the existence of various network drive
> mappings, deletes them if they exist, and then maps them.
> 7. Delete some old shortcuts from the desktop and copy some new ones.
> 8. Quit. (At last!!)
>
> The entire thing is one giant monolithic blob of code. And it's not even
> like there's a subroutine for the "check if this drive is mapped, delete
> the existing mapping, map it to this" procedure. It's actually been
> cut-and-pasted 25 times or something. (The REM statements at the top
> indicate that the script was auto-generated by some scripting tool - but
> modifications further down indicate that the script has since been
> edited by hand...)
>
> Suddenly Mr IT's "I want there to be one login script for each site"
> makes chilling sense... o_O
>
> (Hmm, I wonder... Does having a VB login script work for Windows NT?)
>
> Clearly they're mapping *way* more drives than we are; the listing shows
> at least a dozen, whereas we have a maximum of about 5. But even so,
> what they're doing seems like massive, massive overkill to me...

I feel your pain, my poor Windows server friend...

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