One of the new features in version 2.0 of spiceworks is the ability to monitor for certain events in machines event logs, or to check for certain machine software configs, such as 2 different anti-virus products installed. There are other products out that will do a similar job but this article is about what the new Spiceworks brings to the party.

All the options can be configured from the Settings tab in the main Spiceworks window, and we are interested in 3 of these sections:

• Monitors and Alerts
• Email Notifications
• Event Logging

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Recently I have been made aware of a network management package from Packettrap.com. The idea behind the software is it will provide you a central interface and reporting service for all your network management and diagnostic needs. The free version includes the following services:

• Overview dashboard
• An enhanced ping
• Graphical ping (it shows the info on a graph)
• Trace route
• TFTP server
• MAC address scan
• WHOIS tool
• Various other features, see them on their site

The main idea behind the software is that you can do all of your normal networking tasks from one place. A fine idea, but how well does it work?
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Anyone who has ever worked in a IT helpdesk environment will know that probably 50% + of calls are related in some way or another to the user getting there password wrong, and locking out there account. No mater how much you educate the users, this will always happen, especially if you enforce a complex password policy (and i hope you do!)

I have seen on the odd occasion where thre is something more at work. The user could be happily logging on in the morning, working for a bit when suddenly there account is getting locked out, and as far as you (and they) can tell everything should be fine. You can unlock the account, they carry on working for a bit but then it happens again. There are a few things it could be:

• Someone is trying to use that users account, doesn’t know there password and so keeps locking it. This could be malicious or another reason
• The user has logged onto another machine, and not logged off. Then, if the user has changed their password while the other machine is logged in, it could be requesting resources using the old (and now incorrect) password. Every time it tries to get a network resource that requires authentication it will cause a bad password attempt
• Similar to the above, but the user is logged into a terminal server session an not logged out. For none console sessions on terminal servers users have access to, its always a good idea to enforce an automatic log off after a period of inactivity
• The user could have a connection to a network resource (such as a mapped drive) , that is using old credentials. Personally i’ve never seen this on XP, but it did see it on Win95/98

So, we know what can go wrong, but how the hell do we find out what machine the account lockout is occurring on?

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One of the big advantages SQL reporting services 2005 has over 2000 is the ability to use Muil-Value parameters (I cant really believe it was missing from 2000)

The only problem with them is showing the values of the parameters you have selected on the report, or showing and ‘ALL’ value if the user has selected all available ones. This is a walk through of how to do it, although I’m sure there is a better way out there.

First of all were are going to assume you have a big lift of parameters (say 20+), if you selected them all then you would get a huge ugly list where you show them on the report probably looking something like this:

Now, this does not look very nice on the report, will probably make the report go onto 2 pages when it would fit on one etc. What we want to do in this situation is just output the word ‘ALL’. In order to do this you need to create a new dataset based on the number of possible values in the parameter, and add some logic to the text box that displays the values

Creating the data source

First of all create a new dataset and call it data_param_count or similar. Then copy the sql from what you use to get your parameter option, and instead of selecting all the fields use a SQL select count query to just return the number of rows, eg:

Select Count (*) from tbl_params

This should return you just one row from your table that contains the number of parameters that you can select. We can then use this in our text box to find out the number of parameters we are dealing with.

Displaying the parameter Value

Now that you know how many parameters you are dealing with, you are ready to output them. Drop an text box onto your report, at the top of the body section (you cant drop it into the header as when the header is rendered the data sources have not yet ran). Right click on the new text box and select Expression to open up the expression editor.

You now need to tell the text box to display the contents of the parameter, something if there are too many to display (such as ‘Cannot display all’) and something for if they are all selected (such as ‘ALL’). In order to do this you need to use a couple of functions built into reporting services IIF and Join, these will allow us to check the number of parameters and output what we want. Here’s a code example:

= “Param: ” & IIF(Sum(Fields!ID.Value, “data_param_count”) = Parameters!par_List.Count,”All”,Join(Parameters!par_List.Value, “,”))

So, what’s happening in this line of code?

• First of all we use an IIF to see if the overall number of parameters available to select is equal to the number the user has chosen. We can get how many have been selected using the count property of the parameter object
• Next if the part of the IIF that will run if the statement is true. So here if the count of selected params is the same as the number available we output the string ‘ALL’
• The final part is what happens if the statement is not true. We use the Join function to output a list of all the parameters the user has selected, separated by a comma. Now instead of a long list if you select all the available values, you will get this:

That’s far neater than just outputting a long list. If you wanted to show something else in a case where lots of values(but not all) have been selected, you could just add another IIF statement into the above in the place of the false string that could check for something like more than 10, and display ‘To many to Display’ or something similar.