ServersWhere did the bandwidth go?

Where did the bandwidth go?

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Andy Thompson

If any of you have had the opportunity to be responsible for discovering
where the bandwidth has gone can sympathize with the scenario that I was in recently. And,
I’m not talking about the LAN bandwidth, I’m talking about the WAN bandwidth. We
as a company, use roaming profiles, throw in the mix, a sales force that is constantly
traveling from retail store to retail store. We had deployed Citrix as our solution, and
this should have resolved our problems, did it? Apparently not, and not for the fault of
Citrix, but of our users. What we discovered was happening was that our sales force would
travel to a different store and log into the network as normal. They’d fire up the
Outlook icon from their desktop, and BAM, where did the bandwidth go? And, we are not
talking about users with small 10-15Mb PST files. We’re talking 100-200-300Mb files.
And, before you scoff at us, we do realize that Exchange would be an ideal place to go.
But, politics in the Corporation dictate differently. So, we are stuck for now with
MS-Mail 3.5.

If any of you have had the opportunity to be responsible for discovering where the bandwidth has gone can sympathize with the scenario that I was in recently. And, Im not talking about the LAN bandwidth, Im talking about the WAN bandwidth. We as a company, use roaming profiles, throw in the mix, a sales force that is constantly traveling from retail store to retail store. We had deployed Citrix as our solution, and this should have resolved our problems, did it?

Luckily, these sales people were based from our Main Office. This made the Citrix
solution attractive. But, how could we force them to launch Citrix when they were away
from site which housed their PST files? Actually the answer was pretty simple, once we
knew where to look. The answer came from the “FOR” command. I needed a command
that would determine whether the server that they were logging onto was different than the
one that housed their home drive. And the FOR command was the perfect solution. I wrote
the following little batch file to compare the location of their APPS drive to their home
drive. If they were different it forces them to launch Citrix with a preconfigured profile
that launches outlook. If they were the same then it launches a local copy of Outlook.
Another cool variable variation that I found was the first line, you can actually truncate
the variable name to give you the amount of characters that you want. Say that I wanted
the first 5 characters of the computer name, with the first line of the script, I tell it
to compare the first five characters, if they match, I want it to launch a local copy of
Outlook. This helped with finding out if the computer that the Outlook was being launched
from was in the main site. If so, then we didn’t want it to launch Citrix.

if “%computername:~0,5%” == “WCOMP” goto
Outlook

:Set

for /f “tokens=2 skip=1 delims=” %%i in (‘net use p:’)
do (set appsrvr=%%i)

for /f “tokens=2 skip=1 delims=” %%k in (‘net use u:’)
do (set homesrv=%%k)

:Discover

if %appsrvr% == %homesrv% then goto Outlook

p:

cd citrix

wfcrun32 outlook

goto end

:Outlook

c:

Cd Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice

outlook

:End

It still amazes me the power that one line can contain. What this command is doing is
parsing out the net use p: command. If you type it at a command prompt,” net use
x:” where x is the letter of a mapped network drive that you have. It will display
something like this.

Local name x:

Remote name servernamesharename

Resource type Disk

Status OK

# Opens 0

# Connections 1

The command completed successfully.

All the information that I need was on the 2nd line, and all I wanted was
the servername portion of the line.

for /f “tokens=2 skip=1 delims=” %%i in (‘net use p:’)
do (set appsrvr=%%i)

It obtains the information by skipping the first line, Local
name, and goes to Remote Name, where it then skips the “Remote Name” portion of
the line, and then uses the “” as a delimiter. And then, I use the set command
to enable a environemental variable that I can compare with the same output from the users
home drive. This was an ideal solution for our problem.

If you are going to run this interactively you must use a single % sign, otherwise if
it’s scripted, you need %%.

I hope that this helps with other peoples situations, it’s nice to have powerful
scripting capability at your fingertips. It just takes a little digging to find the right
solution.

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