[Tutor] Renaming computers

[Danny Yoo]

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 traceyandjoe at tiscali.co.uk wrote:

> Could you point me in the right direction, after we have ghosted the
> machines in college we have to rename them, I would like to try and
> write a program that does this through matching the MAC address with the
> computer but I'm quite new to programming and need some advice on where
> to start

Hi Joe,

This project seems doable but will take a bit of work to get right.

For introductions on fundamental programming concepts, you may find the
tutorials in:

    http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers

very helpful in getting up to speed.  If you have questions while going
through a tutorial there, please feel free to ask the group here, and we
will be happy to help.



Once you have a foundation for programming, you should be able to better
tackle the problem.  Your proposed problem sounds very operating-system
dependent, and assuming that the machines you're talking about are Windows
boxes, you may want to talk with the python-win32 folks to see how to go
about this.  They have a mailing list here:

    http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-win32


There are examples of programs that people have written to automate some
Windows administration tasks.  For example:

    http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/347812

is code to get the MAC address of one's ethernet card, and

    http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/360649

is a recipe that automates remote system reboots! So I think it's just a
matter of knowing what particular win32 calls need to be done to change
the Windows name of a machine.

Unfortunately, I really don't know Windows very well.  I'd recommend
poking around with the win32 folks and see if it's possile to get/set the
computer name of a Windows machine.

But learn a little bit of programming first, at least enough so that you
can understand their advice!  *grin*


Good luck to you.