Scalable, Remote Administration of Windows NT

In the UNIX community there is an overwhelming perception that NT is impossible to manage remotely and that NT administration doesn't scale. This was essentially true with earlier versions of the operating system. Even today, out of the box, NT is difficult to manage remotely. Many tools, however, now make remote management of NT not only possible, but under some circumstances very easy. In this paper we discuss how we at Argonne's Mathematics and Computer Science Division manage all our NT machines remotely from a single console, with minimum locally installed software overhead. We also present NetReg, which is a locally developed tool for scalable registry management. NetReg allows us to apply a registry change to a specified set of machines. It is a command line utility that can be run in either interactive or batch mode and is written in Perl for Win32, taking heavy advantage of the Win32::TieRegistry module.