Tweakomatic Utility for IE Settings
I got an email thread the other day that started out with the question of how to add a trusted site into "LocalSystem"'s IE setting via command line or script (which is good question, but more on that later). As part of this thread it also talked about a power toy called Tweakomatic.
Named to follow along in the great TweakUI power toy tradition, Tweakomatic is a tool for setting and configuring Windows and IE Settings. There are other ways to manipulate IE settings like group policy, but for a quick and easy way to do this for a small number of machines remotely, this is a good tool. If you want more details using group policy in XPSP2, see
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/mangxpsp2/mngintro.mspx.
Here is the official blurb from the Microsoft Tweakomatic
download location:
The Tweakomatic is a nifty new utility that writes scripts that allow you to retrieve and/or configure Windows and Internet Explorer settings. So what, you might ask. Well, think about it. Because these are WMI scripts, they can be used to configure settings on remote computers. Need to change something on a remote machine? Then haul out the Tweakomatic. And think about this: because the Tweakomatic writes scripts, you could do something like run these scripts as logon or logoff scripts. In other words, you could quickly, easily, and automatically configure settings on any or all the computers in your organization.
One thing to note is that this tool allows you to make changes to your registry settings, so I would not suggest making changes to your registry willy-nilly without understanding the implications and making a backup. I strongly suggest you read the read me, which is very tongue and cheek in its writing style in addition to being informative.
The tool has pretty basic UI, but offers lots of scripts to set and change IE settings. Now, it does not offer a way to make a web page a trusted site with the default scripts provided (from my usage of it), but you can tweak a lot of other settings in IE.
Now getting back to the question of adding a trusted site via command line or script. If you really want to know, I would suggest you check out the following links for more information:
•
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/security/szone/overview/esc_development.asp •
http://groups.msn.com/windowsscript/aboutsecurity.msnw •
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q182569/ That’s all for now.
Scott