Real Men Don't Click -- Where Real Men Learn

VBScript Reference from DevGuru
	To be perfectly honest, I am not very fond of hacking VBScript. It is pain and suffering for me, but when I do it, I like to have a good reference at hand.

LabMice.net The Windows 2000 Resource Index
	They want to be the definitive online resource for IT Professionals who deploy, manage, and support Microsoft Windows 2000 products and services. Amazingly enough they are quite close to the truth when saying that ...

AppDeploy.com
	Isn't it sick that you need resources telling you how to do silent installs for mainstream applications ... But there we are ...

Unattended
	A sourceforge project regarding the automated setup of standalone windows boxes. Along the lines to what we do ... except without window server. The site also has information for automated seup of individual applications.

Win32 Scripting
	A nice repository of Scripting FAQs and quite a bit of actual scripts fro downloading. Mostly VBScript stuff.

Microsoft Search Page
	We found, that it is often quicker to use the Microsoft Search Page in order to find solutions for a specific problem than to go to their Knowledge Base search page.

Microsoft Technet Page
	A pretty good tutorial all about ris and boot of clients.

NT Command Reference
	A website with a list commands available on Windows 2k boxes. Including Resource Kit comamnds

Perl
	The scripting Language of our choice. It performs superbly under Unix and surprisingly well on Windows. Get it, learn it, be happy.

Cygwin Tools
	The Cygwin tools are ports of the popular GNU development tools and utilities for Windows 95, 98, and NT. They function by using the Cygwin library which provides a UNIX-like API on top of the Win32 API. Finally we are able to use all our beloved command line tools. Lately there was even a release of XFree86 for Windows.

AT&T Research UWIN
	Similar than Cygwin, but totally different code. The UWIN suite used to be proprietary, but it is now available under an Open Source license. Among the notable features of this package is the ability to access the registry as a file system.

SysInternals RegMon and FileMon

RegMon and FileMon are two neat utilities, which intercept all FileSystem and Regiry Accesses, telling you which application tries to do what. This is the ultimate tool for figuring out why unruly applications fail with strange error messages when you try to run them in a protected Windows 200 environment. RegMon and FileMon work beautifully if you star them with runas in a normal user session.

Wise Package Studio
	Wise Package Studio is the only sensible way for repackaging legacy applications into Windows 2000 MSI format. Windows 2000 comes with a tool for this purpose, be the only thing it generates is a headache. So while we generally tried to use only stock Windows tools and hand rolled scripts, this is the major notable exception. See also our MSI chapter for more information.

WPS for Newbies
	A site for new users to Wise Solutions' Wise Package Studio to get them up and running and solve most of their initial questions

Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset
	Microsoft goes OpenSource: The Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset supports a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM setup packages.

Acessing your Windows Server from UNIX

OK, if you install citrix on the Windows server, this has been possible for some time. But with Windows 2000, Microsoft includes terminal server functionality with every Windows 2000 Server. The only problem is, that Microsoft only supplies Clients for Windows. Fortunately there is rdesktop: GNU GPLed client for Windows NT Terminal Server, capable of natively speaking its Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in order to present the user's NT desktop. Make sure you get the latest patches

Set ALL Acls form the Commandline
	Helge has done what we tried to accomplish with the dacl.vbs script with his free setacl tool. It allowes to modify all ACLs from the commandline supporting all the additions made in 2k and XP.

AutoIt
	If you really don't want to click but you would have to, there ist someone who can do it for you :-)