What to use, how to use it....help....please

[keefusa]

To begin with, I'm not a programmer, but I've done some PHP/MySQL/Apache stuff and picked it up okay so I'm at least somewhat confident in my ability. Now for the meat of it....
I do network support for a very large network and this means I waste a considerable amount of time walking nurses and receptionists through tasks such as 'ipconfig' and pinging certain important addresses to help diagnose the situation. What I would like to do is write a ???? that could be pushed to the desktops to simplify the task.

Ideally it would be a web page displaying info such as...
IP information, computer name, how the user is logged on to the machine (local, domain), be able to invoke a script to ping certain addresses, some of which would change based on the users subnet...basically lots of stuff that can be achieved through DOS commands but takes a whole lot of time to walk a user through.

Of course it could be done in a seperate application, but I don't have VB or anything, and I'm not sure I want to get that involved. It would have to be contained completely on the local machine and has to run on NT, 2000, XP and several different machines.

What's the best way to accomplish this? Can anyone give me some direction? Thanks ahead of time for any help.

[Manish Malik]

If all you want to do can be done on Batch Files (.BAT) that run on the target computer, and display information to the user (which he/she can tell you on phone), then simple .HTML webpages served via IIS 5 or Apache can do.

If it requires more, you can go for either of these two similarly simple options:

1. Use ActiveX/Java. Let the target access a webpage and the application is downloaded on the client, it gathers information, and does the work you want, and sends information back (this removes the requirement for the person to tell you on phone). This can get a bit messy as it would have to be tuned for every new thing you want to tweak.

2. Use Visual Basic applications. This is how you can use it. Develop small VB applications to do individual jobs (1 to check other connections by pinging your main server, 1 to traceroute major sites like yahoo.com and check their response times..etc.etc. these are just examples). Now make an HTML/ASP page to display links to all these applications. The user simply clicks on the link; the exe is downloaded on his/her computer; the user runs it; the exe does its job and quits/sends info back.

The solution no.2 used in conjunction with BAT files OR ASP/vbScript can help a lot.

[keefusa]

I thought about the idea of doing a batch file, and that's probably what I'll end up having to do....but I'll have a better chance of getting it approved to push out to the desktops if it's pretty.