Stop and Start Sophos services remotely

Sophos

SophosI was recently approached by one of my colleagues with a dilemma, he had to go round our 30+ servers and stop and start a couple of Sophos’s Windows Services.

Now, as you can imagine this was starting to look like a fairly large and mundane task. Which is when I came up with this little VBScript.

Using this script below, you can pass it a text file with a list of machines you would like it to perform the process on.

In the script below you will see a “” change this to your text file containing machines, full file path.

The format of the text file is one machine per line.

This script is by no means ‘bullet proof’ and could be enhanced easily with little time and effort. It could also be modfied to stopstart any services you like.

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Upload to FTP using Automator

If you spend allot of time uploading files to FTP sites then you may well find this automator add-on invaluable. Essentially this enables you to create a ‘drop box’ type folder in which you can drop files. Then hit the Automator application shortcut, which will automatically ‘chuck’ them up to an FTP folder of your choice.

This is a whole load easier then opening your FTP client each time and logging in then navigating etc etc etc.
To give you some ideas of what you could use this for, I have a couple of variations.. I use one to upload screenshots to a location on my web server for my blog posts. I also have one for uploading important backups to another FTP location. The download also comes with an example workflow to upload to a dropbox account. Perfect if you like drop box, but don’t like the cumbersome dropbox client.
There is also an example which resizes the images before it uploads them!
You can download the add-on from the official homepage. Alternatively download a copy of the XCode source from here.
I guess if you wanted to build on this script, you could even program it to monitor the folder for changes and upload as soon as it happens..? The possibilities are endless.

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Project SIKULI

…. if you can see it, you can script it! Anyone who works or has worked with me will know that’s something I often say. However, Project SIKULI takes that to a whole new level. Project SIKULI works by scripting around screen grabs, so even if you don’t have any scripting knowledge you will still be able to automate those most mundane tasks! Anything with a GUI can be scripted.
Here’s a quick video from YouTube on what it can do
{qtube vid:=6OtmMKYhEjg}
There’s also some more demos over at Project SIKULI’s site
Project SIKULI is available for Windows, Mac and Linux

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