Florida International University

School of Computing and Information Sciences

Masoud Sadjadi’s Home Page

CIS 4431 HOME PAGE
IT Automation

Term Project

To get started with your term project, you would need to first come up with a realistic problem that you can solve it using IT Automation and Remote Control tools such as Kaseya. You should send an email to your instructor to make sure that your idea is approved before you start working on the project. For those of you who have been working in this field, you may be able to simply choose one of the issues that you face with it on a daily basis. For those who may be new to this field, you may want to start by going through some solutions and then find a realistic problem with a complete scenario that can be solved by this solution. A good starting point is to study the sample Agent Procedures and Monitor Sets in Kaseya.

It is recommended that term projects to be done individually, but teams of 2 to 3 students are also acceptable, as long as the project is large enough and everyone is willing to work on all different parts of the project. Note that you need the approval of your instructor for this.

Deliverable

The deliverable for the project includes a well-developed document accompanied by its training video. Your deliverable (both document and video) must include the following 5 sections:

1. Problem and Motivation: Introduce a problem and motivate it. For example, machines are running out of disk space due to the increase of temporary files and motivate its importance and impact by showing how this problem could affect IT management everyday life.
2. Solution: Find a solution to the problem and show how using IT Automation and Remote Control tools can help solve the introduced problem. For example, using Kaseya, you can make an agent procedure that will run disk clean up on a regular basis. Note that you would need to introduce the tools that you may be using to solve the problem. If the tool is Kaseya, there is no need for this introduction.
3. Behind the Scene: In this part, explain in detail what is happening within each step in the process of solving the problem using the tools. For example, if you wrote an agent procedure that starts up the disk clean up, you would need to go through the steps and fully explain what is actually happening behind the scene. In case you use an out of box tool, it could be the case that some of the details are not completely clear to you. In such cases, you should just explain those parts that you can and indicate that you are not sure how the other parts work, but you can offer your intuition.
4. Customizing the Solution: It may be the case that you would need to customize your solution to work in different environments. For example, if the disk clean up works on Windows, what can be changed to make that procedure to work on Mac as well.
5. Disclaimer: What are the shortcomings of your solution? What can be improved about your solution? For example, if your disk clean up was tested only on Windows XP, you would need to indicate that you have not tested it on other Windows platforms, even though you guess that it should work without any problem. Also, if your solution were only good for Windows, for example, then you would need to indicate that it does not work on Mac, Linux, etc.

How to develop the document?

The document must be developed as a MS Word document. You should follow the general formatting of the hands-on documents that you have seen for the different modules. Note how the screenshots are labeled in the hands-on documents and try to do the same in yours. You must make sure that your write-up is free of any spelling or grammatical errors. For this, please proofread your write-up at least a couple of times before you turn it in. Here is the link where you can download the template for the World Document. Please closely follow the template when developing your document.

How to develop the video?

The vidoe must be developed using Adobe Captivate. You should follow the general formatting and flow presented in the hands-on vidoes that you have seen for the different modules. Please pay attention to what colors we used for highlighting, what font we used, etc. etc. For your convenience, we have developed some slides that explain how to develop your training video using Adobe Captivate. Also, we have accompanied a training video for this. Note that if you have any doubts, you should always go back and watch the hands-on videos that were developed for different modules and use them as guideline for your video.

How to turn in your term project?

Please include a copy of the document (in two formats of MS Word doc and pdf) and the Adobe Captivate video (the raw Adobe Captivate video or cptx and the generated htm, swf, and js that you can get when you publish the video and choose the Export to HTML option) on a DVD and turn it in at the beginning of the last class. You may have developed other materials to produce your document and video (e.g., PowerPoint slides, screenshots, audio files, pictures, etc.). Again, please do make sure that all the raw materials (e.g., cptx and doc files) are included in your DVD in separate directories with meaningful names for the directories and for the files.

Projects:

• System Optimization
  System optimization is a set of procedures to reduce running processes in a computer, changing work mode, deleting unnecessary break off for more efficient computer performance, optimizing file location for faster data write & read, freeing more system resources for computer use and reducing unnecessary system boot processes, etc. This will increase the stability and speed of computers, no harm to hardware.
  By Jason Aparcana (Progress Report)
• Checking for the Presence of Updated Anti-Virus Software
  I will define a procedure to check a machine to see if it has an Anti-Virus installed and if so do a check on whether the software is updated and offer options of different Anti-Virus programs.
  By Salmyr Auguste
• Web Browsing Policy Compliance Monitoring Using Keylogging
  Several users continue to violate the Internet usage policy at their workplace. We are going to cover method of Websites containing https are not monitored by the current Internet filtering. Automated software can be used to create a log of websites accessed. A keylogger can be used to set off a trigger when a string of consecutive characters is entered. The logs from Kaseya can identify which workstation was used and the currently logged in user.
  By Dennis Arjun and Barrington Brown (Progress Report)
• Clean and Fix Registry Errors
  To create an agent procedure that launches the software Auslogics Boost Speed to clean and fix registry errors once a month. By doing this, it will clean up any errors that may exist in the registry and increase the speed on the computer.
  By Krystle Crawford (Progress Report)
• Creating a Network Topology from Scratch Using an Assortment of Network Mapping Tools
  A company tasks you with creating a visual representation of the company's network. No network hardware documentation has ever been made, where do you start?
  By Derek D. Cuesta
• Disable/Enable CD-ROM Devices
  A company wants to prevent employees from using CD/DVD at work during the office hours, but would like to enable these devices for another group of users during evening hours.
  By Armando Saenz (Progress Report)
• Ink Level and Network Reporting using SNMP
  Using Spiceworks, an IT Automation software, we will set up Spiceworks to monitor ink levels on all network printers, and configure the agent to email us when ink levels have fallen below 20% and also to report when network connectivity has dropped.
  By Erick Hernandez and Raymond Gonzalez (Progress Report)
• Checking Network/Port Connectivity
  Using Kaseya agent procedures that deal with ping check, port check as well as web check, I would allow a user to make sure that an address can be pinged so as to check Internet connectivity. Also, I would monitor certain ports to check whether they are open or closed. For example, this can be used to allow printer sharing over a network. Also check if a websites content exists according to the url.
  By Emmanuel Giboyeaux (Progress Report)
• Data Privacy
  A company named Investigator "r" us has about 100 investigators. the investigators work from their home office and are required to use the company laptop to take notes while conducting interviews. An investigator must use the assigned laptop to write a report that contains confidential information gathered during the interviews. Once the investigator writes the report and submits the report to the company, the investigator is required to delete the report from the laptop. The company has provided the investigators with a laptop that uses Windows XP Professional. All reports are written in Microsoft word and are kept in a folder called Reports. The folder is suppose to be encrypted and once the report has been submitted, the report needs to deleted as per company policy and no personal information is to remain on the laptop after the report has been submitted and the client has paid. There are about 100 stressed out investigators working for the company and there have been reports of investigators losing their laptops and having there laptops stolen from their cars. while 98% of the investigator are complying with the company policy of encrypting the reports and deleting the reports from their laptops, it has been discovered that the encrypted files containing the deleted confidential reports were retrieved and published on the Internet. The company has been embarrassed and has taken a financial loss! According to the company's Information Department, it is believed that the criminal's used data recovery software to retrieve the information contained in the encrypted files that were deleted and left in the recycle bin. To address this issue, the confidential data contained in the reports needs to be wiped out completely. For example, Windows XP Professional contains a tool called Cipher.exe. The cipher command can easily be used on the laptops using the command cipher.exe /w command. the cipher.exe /w command will write on the section of the disk that was used for the reports 1's and 0's at random to make sure that the data becomes unrecoverable. Using an agent procedure script developed in Kaseya, we can save time, money and not to mention the embarrassment of having lost a clients confidential information. The wiping of unallocated disk space using a cipher procedure will be the focus of the project.
  By Estuardo Fernandez (Progress Report)
• Remote Control in Safe Mode
  This project attempts to assist in the removal of a virus running as a user-based service on a computer that is connected to the Internet. To do this, we develop a procedure to remotely control interact with the computer in the Safe Mode. This procedure can be revised to help avoid users from distributing "illegal" or "restricted" content via Internet Access. For this, we disable the Internet connection, but will keep the Kaseya agent connected to the Internet.
  By Fernando Perez (Progress Report)
• Maintaining Online Privacy by Deleting Internet Browsers' Cached Data
  To erase all online digital footprint by cleaning all history and temporary stored data from Internet browsers.
  By Hector a Rodriguez (Progress Report)
• Remote Kapersky Antivirus and PC Cleanup deployment
  Company A's IT team has been constantly battling users PCs being attacked by viruses and maleware. They discover none of the computers have any form of security measures and all users are logging with the administrator credentials. They have also been getting complaints via email and phone calls that the computers are running slow and are running out of space. Printers are also running out of ink and toner, and no one is being notified. The IT team needs to fully change how the office is working before the company starts loosing more money and hurting productivity.
  By Erick Hernandez
• Changing All Internet Browser Homepages to a Desired Site
  Motivation/Problem Statement?
  By Luis Hernandez
• Setting IE Home Page and Starting IE after User Logins
  A company is creating a new intranet website for the company employees so that they can communicate more efficiently. In order to make sure employees utilize the new intranet, the company would like to have IE open up with the intranet site every time a user logs on. Using Kaseya, I plan on creating an agent procedure that will set the new intranet site as their IE home page, and have IE launch when a user logs into their workstation.
  By Paola Nunez
(Progress Report)
• Theft Protection Program: Search & Rescue
  A well-known law firm is in need of a theft protection program on all of their managed computers. The managers want to protect their clients' confidential files and information stored on these computers under any circumstances especially theft. They would like to create, develop and deploy a program that would protect their computers, if ever stolen. We will develop and implement a series of programs and steps that will be activated if any of these computers were to be stolen. Our theft protection program will protect the files and have a search and rescue program installed to notify and report back to the administrator of the unauthorized use. The program would capture a picture, record a ten second video of its unknown user, prevent and protect the use of any ports, USB and CD drives, retrieve the IP address and return all the information to the company's administrator.
  By Miguel Fernandez and Aysia Glinton
• Recovering Stolen Computers and Laptops
  Computer and Laptop theft is a very common problem. Specifically we will focus in the FIU environment where the library has experienced a rash of laptop thefts. We will use the agent procedure Camera Picture Capture and a few other procedures to help recover stolen laptops we will go into greater detail when on the agent procedures we will use to recover stolen computers and laptops.
  By Omari Grant and Danlil Perelshteyn (Progress Report)
• Kill & Uninstall Multiple Running Anti-Virus Applications
  A common problem an IT professional may run into with home users is that they have more than one Anti-Virus program running at once. Anti-Virus software uses a considerable amount of resources, so to have more than one running at once leaves the OS with few resources to handle other tasks. This may also be an issue in larger networks, where an administrator has accidentally installed more than one Anti-Virus program, or purposely installed more than one but has not coordinated their run times. There are many solutions to this problem, but the solution I will focus on involves killing the excess Anti-Virus processes and uninstalling the excess Anti-Virus applications, leaving the desired Anti-Virus application behind. A monitoring procedure would be implemented as well to prevent this sort of situation from occurring in the first place. The focus will be focus on Windows operating systems. Mac OS X,, Linux, and other Windows operating systems will not be tested. Also, only a limited number of Anti-Virus applications will be considered.
  By Jasmine English (Progress Report)
• Cleaning and Organizing System Files Using Agent Procedures
  Managed systems are in need of optimization. To address this issue, we will develop a procedure to run the following tasks on the managed system on a regular basis: disk cleanup, error-checking, and defragmentation. The virtual memory of the machine will also be increased to the system managed size to aide in the solution.
  By Alexander Rengifo (Progress Report)
• Automated Updates for a List of Applications Utilizing Ninite
  This will save some time for IT professional who would need to update several applications manually and one-by-one. The solution would skip applications that are already up to date.
  By Juan C Pichardo (Projgress Report)
• Setting Trusted & Untrusted Sites
  Adding trusted websites and also blacklisting or blocking certain websites, such as social networking (ex. Facebook), streaming media (ex. YouTube), gaming, etc.
  By Kevin Perez
• Remote Enable/Disable of Automatic USB Device Detection
  ABC Securities Financial company is having issues with users copying classified information from the computers and management would like to prevent that from happening. Also, the IT department has identified that many of the computer virus infections have been caused by copying files brought via USB drives. Therefore, management has requested to block all USB devices from being detected; only the IT department will be allowed to open USB drives.
  By Renatto Garro
• MP3/Audio Alert and Deletion
  An agent procedure that removes or alerts the admin of unwanted audio files from local machines to limit the amount of unnecessary data.
  By Gregory Hayes (Progress Report)
• Maintaining Active Dirctory
  An AD script will be developed to perform routine maintenance on an Active Directory. The solution will include removing/deactivating computers that have not connected to the domain in a long time or computers named outside the company policies. The solution will also move computers named correctly according to company policies to proper OUs based on the computers name. The solution will be a script based on PowerShell and will be executed as a scheduled task.
  By Mario Eirea (Progress Report)
• Automatic Deployment of OS and Software Applications
  We will be automating the installation of Windows and a Linux distribution using a third party software for the deployment of the OS. We will then use Kaseya to automate the deployment of different applications that we want on those machines.
  By Anthony Reinosa and James Lamb
• Monitoring and Restricting Website Activity
  Setting limits on employees' access to time-wasting Web activities while still permitting them to reach the sites they need to conduct business. Completely blocking the Internet for some users or restrict access to only those websites which employees may need to access during working hours. Controlling the Internet by blocking websites that you don't want users visiting.
  By Melissa Parrella
• Antivirus Decommission and Deployment Using Kaseya
  The University of Miami chose to end its contract with McAfee and start a site license with Symantec. We will use these agent procedures to remove McAfee from all machines and install Symantec. Using Kaseya will avoid software license violations and service interruptions.
  By Celia Patrice McFadden (Progress Report)
• Automating port forwarding using the program "Simple Port Forwarding" through Kaseya
  A common problem in many homes is large latency or "lag" due to the security settings on their routers. The problem is not a noticeable one when browsing the internet, reading e-mail, or watching youtube. Yet, when you have a program that needs to establish an internet connection for what ever reason, they either can't or have severe lag. This issue is resolved by port forwarding but, most people do not know HOW to forward ports on their router. For this problem I propose using a program called Simple Port Forwarding.
  By Raphael Ruiz
• FTP Remote Client Backup Script(Remote Backup)
  Backups are necessity in today's fast paced world, as disaster can strike anytime resulting in the loss of important information. Clients on a network that need some level of backup but are not near a Network Area Storage or don't have a USB drive. These clients could backup to a FTP server by using WinSCP and a Kaseya Script to do the job. Kaseya provides secure FTP functionality so that you can easily transfer files between computers using a simple drag and drop interface.
  By Jacobson Donnis

Projects Presentations & Status Report:

Presentation template file can be downloaded from this link.

Nov. 14
Aparcana,Jason Alfredo
Auguste,Salmyr
Brown,Barrington
Cameron,Dennis P
Crawford,Krystle
Cuesta,Derek D

Nov. 16
Donnis,Jacobson
Eirea,Mario
English,Jasmine Catherine
Fernandez,Estuardo
Fernandez,Miguel Angel
Garro,Renatto

Nov. 21
Giboyeaux,Emmanuel
Glinton,Aysia Simone
Gonzalez,Raymond
Grant,Omari A
Hayes,Gregory J
Hepburn,James R.L.

Nov. 23
Hernandez,Erick J
Hernandez,Luis
Lamb,James Edward
McFadden,Celia Patrice
Medina,Hernando
Nunez,Paola M

Nov. 28
Parrella,Melissa J
Perelshteyn,Daniil A
Perez,Fernando R
Perez,Kevin Henderson
Pichardo,Juan C
Ramachandran,Arjun

Nov. 30
Reinosa,Anthony Thomas
Rengifo,Alexander
Rodriguez,Hector A
Ruiz,Raphael
Saenz,Armando Jose
Ziegenhirt,Alejandro Luis