Some of our customers have started migrating
their client OSs from Windows XP to
Windows Vista. They’re pretty impressed by
the Vista features that simplify their administrative
workloads. One such feature is the
Event Viewer’s Attach Task To This Event option,
which lets you create an event-triggered
action, such as sending an email notification
when a specific event occurs. (To access this
option, type Event Viewer in the Start menu’s
search box, and click the Event Viewer icon
that appears under the Programs heading.
In Event Viewer, double-click an event ID in
the Summary of Administrative Events box to
bring up the Attach Task To This Event option
in the Actions pane.)
Once customers get a taste of using
event-triggered actions in Vista, they
often ask how they can create them on
the remaining XP workstations in their
domains without having to use third-party
software. I provide them with a relatively
simple solution that uses a VBScript script
and eventtriggers.exe, a command-line
utility included in Windows Server 2003
and XP. (Eventtriggers.exe isn’t included in
Windows 2000 and won’t run if you copy it
to Win2K. Vista doesn’t include this utility
because the Attach Task to this Event feature
makes it unnecessary.)
The solution is as follows:
1. Launch Notepad and enter the script
in Listing 1, replacing all the string values
in double quotes with your own information.
(Leave in the double quotes.) You can
download this script by going to www.windowsitpro.com, entering 99979 in the
InstantDoc ID box, clicking Go, then clicking
the Download the Code Here button.
2. Save the script as Email.vbs.
3. Copy the Email.vbs script to the XP
workstation. For this example, let’s put it in
the C:\utils folder.
4. On the XP workstation, launch a
command-prompt window and enter the
command
Eventtriggers /Create
/TR "Event Triggers for All Errors"
/T ERROR /TK C:\utils\email.vbs
(Although this command appears on several
lines here, you’d enter it all on one line
in the command-prompt window.) In this
command, the /TR parameter provides the
trigger’s name (Event Triggers for All Errors),
the /T parameter specifies the type of event
that the trigger should capture (ERROR
events), and the /TK parameter identifies
the trigger action (execute Email.vbs).
When an error appears in any log file on
that workstation, Email.vbs is executed and
sends an email notification to the recipient
designated in the script. You can fine-tune
the Eventtriggers command using its many
parameters to capture specific events
based on the event ID. For a list of the available
parameters, run the command
Eventtriggers /Create /?
in a command-prompt window.
—Jian Bo