HTA Login Box and Question/Answer for EEPC5
NOTE: These are now used in the AutoDomain 5.5x script.
I was playing around with Autodomain recently, and it occurred to me how awful, unreliable, and generally perverse it is to use internet explorer to collect information from the user.
Over the last few years, I’ve found that using IE as a way of presenting information to users from a VBScript tool is just fraught with problems. I’ve had machines tell me that IE does not exist (even though it was running at the time), IE has crashed, baulked, appeared minimized, behind windows etc. Generally it’s proven to be really, really unreliable.
Anyway, rant over, I’m toying with the idea of using HTA’s instead to collect information, and here are two I’ve written so far which do useful things like collect credentials from a user, or get a variable number of question/answer sessions.
Yes, I know they are cludgy, but they look good, and I stopped learning about HTML in 1995, so I am still a fan of table layouts (when I should be using absolute positioning).
Feel free to comment on my code, or let me know how you end up using them!
You can download LoginBox.hta and GetQuestionAnswer.hta from my companion site, http://sites.google.com/site/CTOGoneWild
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Who?
 | EVP Cyber Product Innovation for Mastercard. Formally the Chief Technology Officer for Intel Secure Home Gateways, CTO for McAfee Enterprise Endpoint, CTO McAfee Innovation team, and Founder/CTO SafeBoot Corp. |
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Simon Says - Musings of a Technology CTO 
They Look great, I don’t have a use for them as of yet but I might mash them together in a post install helper kind of way to make a mini auto domain.
Morning simon,
I am a network security engineer with soft solution ltd., Nigeria. I am new to Mcafee Endpoint Encryption and I have project coming up on it. I understand the technology pretty much, however, i have been having loads of issues regarding creating a BartPE recovery cd for windows vista and 7. The mcafee documentation does not explain much either. I would appreciate if you can help in this regard. This is causing a nightmare for me and I am even considering not enabling pre-boot authentication as a way out. Practically some systems fail to load when the preboot authentication fails tom load and if I dont have a recovery cd, then i am left with the option to format, which to me, is an obscure move.
thanks
Babotola, as long as you understand BartPE, there’s a plugin already made for you in the Tools CD you can download from McAfee. If you don’t though, you are probably best getting help from community.mcafee.com (in the data protection forums). There’s a script on my companion site (sites.google.com/site/CTOGoneWild) to build a rescue cd using Windows AIK (WinPE), if you’re more familiar with that as well.
Simon these are great…
Is it possible to populate the local recovery questions using the scripting tool. It looks like the updateusercfg will do the trick but when I tested this just updates some of the 10 user labels for each user. I’m looking to bulk update the answers from another tool which captures them, any ideas?
You can update the helpdesk challenge/response questions and labels with the API, but not the user local recovery questions. They can only be captured from the user during the registration process.