Scheduling Windows audits locally on the target devices

Sometimes Windows doesn't like talking over the network using RPC, WMI or Windows File Sharing. This happens for a variety of reasons - none of them relate to Open-AudIT.

It may even be that the Windows firewall (or another third party firewall) is blocking all connections. Whatever the cause, Open-AudIT cannot remotely talk to (or can only partially talk to) the target Windows devices.

For these difficult PCs I recommend setting up a scheduled task to run and submit the audit result to the server. This is easy to do.

First you will need a copy of the audit script. The simplest way to obtain it is to logon to Open-AudIT from a machine that is not the Open-AudIT Server, then go to menu → Discover → Audit Scripts → List Audit Scripts. Click the Download button for the Windows audit script.

The reason to not logon to Open-AudIT from localhost is so the data submission URL in the audit script is populated correctly.

Save the audit script to c:\windows on the target machine(s).

Then create a scheduled task (on whatever schedule you like) to execute the task using cscript c:\windows\audit_windows.vbs.

And that's all there is to it.

Once the task has run (feel free to "run now"), you should see data for that machine in Open-AudIT.