ChatGPT and scripting

@kim the AI tools are pretty good at writing scripts, even Atera's does a good job at this. I would highly recommend to you or anyone else that you take some time to learn what it is that's being developed for you. You should be able to understand what the script is doing so you can make changes or tune for your own needs.

Writing scripts to do most basic things (like anything Atera's built in script generator can produce) is really not challenging (if you want help PM me). The AI tools will get you there far faster than even a knowledgable developer. The benefit to understanding the language and syntax is that you can customize it to fit your needs - often times improving the script!

Treat the AI tools like you would an intern. You probably wouldn't take code written by an intern and run it on your endpoints without review - treat the AI code the same way. If you don't understand what your intern is doing or how they're doing it, you might want to learn that first 😀

Not understanding what's happening in your scripts is a liability to you and your customers.

Any code that you didn't write may introduce changes or actions you did not expect. Here's an example: create a new Powershell script in Atera using the AI generator and ask it to restart the computer in Safe Mode. It will probably produce code that results in the computer restarting twice. Now switch the script format to a batch file and generate the script again using the same prompt - this time it will likely result in a single restart. This is probably a poor example, but you get the idea - unexpected/unintended actions.

I love the AI scripting help. I have yet to be able to use the output out of the box, but I still think it is a huge time saver. Being able to get 60-80% of a script and then fine tune it is amazing imo.

I generally use it as a starting place for my scripts, but never trust it off the bat.
In general with AI or some scriptlet you find online, if you don't know what it is doing, you shouldn't be running it.

I have a recent example.

I just switched our company over to a new phone system and needed a script to iteratively factory reset all of the phones in multiple locations based on IP ranges (Poke each IP in a range, try to login with a password, factory reset, move on). The system generated a script for me, and I am actually pretty sure it would have worked if the phones had API access turned on. Ended up doing it manually due to time constraints, but the script was a great start to something that I had no idea how to complete without a lot of up front research.

Prompt:
iteratively factory reset polycom vvx 250 phones within an ip range of 192.168.5.1/24 using a password "1234"

Set the IP range to scan
$ipRange = "192.168.5."
Set the password for the factory reset
$password = "1234"
Loop through each IP address in the range
for ($i=1; $i -le 254; $i++) {

$ipAddress = $ipRange + $i.ToString()
}
# Ping the IP address to check if it's online

$ping = New-Object System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping

$pingReply = $ping.Send($ipAddress)


if ($pingReply.Status -eq "Success") {

    # If the phone is online, send the factory reset command with the password

    $webRequest = [System.Net.WebRequest]::Create("http://$ipAddress/cgi-bin/api-sys_operation?operation=factory_reset")

    $webRequest.Method = "POST"

    $webRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"

    $webRequest.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Basic " + [System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes("admin:$password")))

    $webRequest.GetResponse()

}