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In "Tricks and Traps" on page 183 of your October issue, a reader asked about a problem with a 3Com card. I encountered the same problem, but the solution was in the BIOS.
Here's how I fixed it. In an Award BIOS, go to PCI and Onboard I/O Setup. Disable pnp bios auto config, first IRQ 9, second IRQ 11, third IRQ 10, fourth IRQ 12. This solution fixed the problem of no soft reset and let me keep the bus mastering.
—David Howse
dhowse@alternatives.com
Automated Clean-Up
Recently, I have added more than 1400 users to my network. This number is not a lot for a large network, but most of these accounts are mobile: The users don't sit at the same workstation all the time. Under Windows NT Workstation 4.0, I store the roaming user profiles on the server as a file and several directories that migrate down to the local workstation when the user logs on. The user profiles contain from 1.2MB to 4MB of data. When you're dealing with multiple users, over time, this data can affect space on the drives. Also, the systems suffer from memory leaks that only a reboot can cure.
Because I have been plagued by such problems, I created a simple Perl script (available for download at http://www.winntmag.com) to locate systems (which I list in a text file called syslist.txt), reboot them, delete profiles from the local directory, and clean up the temp directory. To use this script, you need Perl 5.0 for Windows NT, shutdown.exe from the Microsoft Windows NT Resource Kit for NT 3.51, cacls.exe to set file rights, and full understanding of the AT command.
Follow these steps when setting up this utility:
1. Install Perl 5.0 for NT.
2. Create a directory, adminlog, for the log file off the root drive of the managing system.
3. Create a command file if you want to use the AT command scheduler to automate the script. Make sure you put this file in the \winnt\system32 directory. (AT has a hard time finding things anywhere else.) The contents of the command file are as follows:
cd\
echo * cleaning system
clean.pl
4. Create a syslist.txt file with the machine names of systems you want to clean up. Make sure the last name has an additional space because Perl's CHOP command deletes the last character from the line. Also, place this file into the root. Example:
pc130-01
nickstuff
webrunner
jackie
5. Place the contents of the script in a file called clean.pl.
6. Use Explorer, View, Options, File Types to associate .PL extensions with perl.exe.
7. Enter the following command at a command prompt:
AT 02:00am /every:m,t,w,th,f,s,su clean
This command will run the clean.bat or clean.cmd every night at 2:00 am. Every morning, you will find a log file labeled with the day of the year and the year; for example, 343_96.log. I hope this script helps you as much as it has helped me.
—Garren Shannon
Garren@EECS.WSU.EDU