Professional Audit Expander™ v4.0

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Tutorial 12

Scheduling your security scans

Scanning a very big folder hierarchy can take a lot of time especially if the hierarchy is deep and has a great deal of files. Scheduling your scans can save you precious time and avoid using network resources during working hours.

Here are the steps to follow in order to schedule your permissions security scans. In this tutorial, we will show you how to pass parameters through Professional Audit Expander using the command lines and the Windows scheduler. The following conventions have been used in this tutorial:

• The server we want to scan will be called MyServer.
• The share gathering the folders will be called MyShare.
• The folder or directory hierarchy we want to scan will be called MyFolders.
• Professional Audit Expander has been installed in the default directory which is C:\Program Files\Professional Audit Expander.

The first step is to create a batch file with the command line that will execute PAE.

1. Open a windows command prompt (menu Start --> Programs --> Accessories --> Command Prompt)
2. At the prompt, type notepad and hit the return key.
3. In the notepad, type the following command and hit the return key:

"C:\Program Files\Professional Audit Expander\pae" /S:\\MyServer\MyShare\MyFolders /O:NREC /Output:C:\security.pae

4. From the menu, select the option File --> Save. Name the file scan.bat and save it in C:\Programs Files\Professional Audit Expander.

• The option /S specifies the complete path of the folder hierarchy you want to scan
• The options /O:NREC are:

• N: Scan NTFS Security permissions
• R: Relative Differential
• E: Extra Folder Information
• C: Output file in compare format

In the example above, we have decided to scan the NTFS security permissions but we can of course the ownership or the audit attributes. To scan the ownership attributes, replace the option N by O and to scan the audit attributes, replace the option N by A.

• The option /Output specifies the complete path and the name of the output file.

5. Focus on the command prompt by clicking on the window.
6. In order to schedule the job at 10:00pm, at the prompt, type the following command and hit the return key:

at 10:00pm "C:\Program Files\Professional Audit Expander\scan.bat"

7. Close the command prompt window.

Beware that PAE will run using the account that created the job. Make sure that the user has sufficient rights to access the folders on the server. An alternative in creating the scheduled job is to use the Add Scheduled Task wizard in the menu Start --> Settings --> Control Panel --> Scheduled Tasks. With the wizard, you can specify which user account will run the job.

You do not need to be logged on to the computer that runs PAE. Once the job has finished running, you will have at the root C: of your computer the file security.pae gathering all the NTFS security permissions of your folder hierarchy. This file is in text format and can be opened using PAE, a text editor or Microsoft^© Excel.