Distribution of Enterprise Manager registrations

This was just an answer in a forum in September, but I keep getting requests for the script. So I am sharing it here for anyone that could be interested:

Problem: large amount of registered servers, multiple DBA's needing updated registration info, DBA workstations added or rebuilt, many servers added at once. In cases like these, manually rebuilding or updating the registration info is not nice ... ;-)

With SQL7/NT4 we could save the registrations with a registry save/restore, but this doesn't work on SQL2K/W2K anymore. When trying the "Read from remote" option from EM, we found it was also not working (Q280836).

Using this DMO script we can solve it:

a) Run it on the "source" workstation with CSCRIPT //NOLOGO, it shows all the current registrations. Redirecting the output we create the configuration file.

b) We could make changes to this config file with Notepad, for example regrouping servers, or adding servers that are still not available.

c) Running the script on the "destination" machine with this config file as a parameter rebuilds the whole registration info according to the definitions.

Before this it drops all current EM configurations for your account (HKCU) and also any non-"user independent" EM registration (HKLM) (this is on purpose in order not to leave unsafe shared configurations laying around). As a safety measure, previously existing registration definitions are shown before being deleted.

Interesting side-note: standard security passwords are exposed by DMO without any restriction if you have access to the DBA workstation. Makes another good point for not using standard security. But if unavoidable, at least always use the "user independent" registration option ..., from another login you will not get access to them.

The script comments restrictions about special characters in server names, passwords and group names. Another disadvantage: it cannot handle "