Overview

This doc tells you how to roll out a VNC to a large number of NT clients.

Requirements

Some knowledge of the NET VIEW command in a workgroup or domain environment. You can also use NETDOM or GLOBAL to get a list of computers.

Steps

1. Get a list of the machines

You can do this a number of ways. I tend to use net view \\workgroupname > x.txt and pipe that to a text file. A little bit of awk (or perl) will sort the names out for you. You should aim for a text file a little bit like this:

buffy
xander
willow
giles 

2. Append vnc command to list

There are a couple of ways you can call the push script: 1) append "call vnc" to each machine name or 2) use Jeff Steward's FOR statement method.

Paste the the words "call vnc" with a space between that and the machine name. You should also decide on what options you want to use on the command line. I recommend that you include /log - this is so the script records it's progress. I've put something along the lines of install vnc using the admin user from the domain "mydomain". If you had a local admin common to each PC, then you could use that too. Paste these options at the end of each line.

vnc buffy /user mydomain\admin adminpass /log 
vnc xander /user mydomain\admin adminpass /log 
vnc willow /user mydomain\admin adminpass /log 
vnc giles/user mydomain\admin adminpass /log  

3. Running the Script

Save this as machines.cmd in the folder you keep vnc.cmd in. Now, drop into a command prompt and your batch file. This new script will tend attempt to install VNC to each of the machines. As the vnc.cmd script has some error catching ability, it will skip the machines that aren't turned on or don't have IP. Check the results.txt file when you've finished.

Alternative: Use the FOR command

This idea was sent in by Jeff Steward:

1. Make a workstations.txt file with all the target machine names in.

2. Then from the command prompt type the following:

for /F "tokens=1" %i in (workstations.txt) do call vnc %i /user domain\admin password /log /vnc

This will read in each workstation name and pump that result into the command following the DO statement.

3. Sit back and watch the process push VNC out to the cilents.