Browse by Tags

• Boot Wizard
• ConfigMgr
• Custom Scripts
• Database
• Development
• Frontend
• MDT
• MDT 2008
• MDT 2010
• MDT 2012
• Microsoft Deployment
• SCCM
• SMS
• vbscript
• Webservice

Compare Active Directory computer accounts with Configuration Manager resources

Despite all discovery methods, Health scripts and other cleanup efforts it might be helpful from time to time to simply compare all the computer account objects that we have in Active Directory with our resources in ConfigMgr. There are a couple posts available, that demonstrate how to integrate information from Active Directory into SQL reports. See e.g. “ How to add AD data to ConfigMgr reporting ” from Garth Jones. As you can see, in his post, Garth shows already how to compare AD accounts with...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Custom Scripts, Active Directory, Database, ConfigMgr

Handling lists in MDT web service calls – Adding Computers / Users to Active Directory groups

A common question if it comes to deployments is, how to add a computer (or user) to one or several Active Directory groups. As you probably know, I generally prefer using web services for any Active Directory related task, as this avoids a lot of typical issues like permission problems, adding ADSI to the WinPE etc. Luckily the Deployment Web Service , which is freely available on CodePlex , has some appropriate functions that allow us to fulfill this task. Adding a computer (or user) to a single...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Active Directory, MDT, MDT 2012

Offline Domain Join with MDT

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 come with a new feature called “Offline Domain Join”. With this, you get the possibility to join a computer or member server to the domain, even if that computer/server currently isn’t connected to the domain. Why would I need that, you might ask. Well, think about remote workers or remote technicians, that might only have a VPN connection to your network. Or you have (or are) an external company (OEM, etc.), preparing the new computers at a remote location and...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Custom Scripts, Microsoft Deployment, Active Directory, MDT, vbscript

Deployment Web service 7.3 – Basic security

With the updated Version 7.3 ( Download ) just being published, the growing number of available functions, covering more and more demands in todays deployments, it’s not only an advantage of having such a huge toolset available. In its default implementation, the Web Service is configured to execute actions under certain user account. While this makes it pretty easy to troubleshoot and verify the functions are working, everyone with access to this web service will now be able to execute actions,...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Active Directory, MDT

Deployment Web service – Version 7.3 published

Today I published version 7.3 of the Deployment web service. Beside some small bug fixes and minor additions, three new features have been added: 1. SCCM Client Center support A completely new web service part has been added that’s exposing a couple of functions (55 to be accurate) from the SCCM Client Center automation library written by Roger Zander , giving the possibility to execute certain tasks on a client like pushing Software updates, refreshing the machine policy etc. A full list of functions...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Active Directory, MDT

Deployment web service - Version 7.1 released

I’m happy to announce the release of Version 7.1 of the Deployment web service . The biggest and probably most useful change in this release is the implementation of NLog as logging provider. As already described in a previous post Add logging to your applications - NLog for beginners it’s now possible to influence the logging at runtime. With this version the Active Directory and the SCCM/SMS parts of the Deployment web service have been updated with this new logging capabilities already. The MDT...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Active Directory, MDT

Has been a while …

since my last post. And I just wanted to take the opportunity to send a quick “ I’m still alive ” and give an overview of what is going to happen in the next time. In the last two posts ( VCS - Part 1 , VCS - Part 2 ) I wrote about Version\Revision Control Systems in general and how they could be of use, even for scripting or administrative purposes (yes, one article is still waiting to be published ;-) ). As not being a professional developer those typical developer tools are sometimes still new...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Active Directory, Boot Wizard, MDT, Frontend, Development

Moving Computers in Active Directory during MDT Deployments – Step by Step

In a former article I explained in quite detail how to move computers in Active Directory using a webservice . As I got a couple requests for an updated and more condensed Step by Step guide I also took the opportunity and rewrote the sample scripts to fit to the new MDT 2010 script templates. If you have used this scripts already before, you just need to be aware, that they got renamed so you might want to check your Task Sequence steps if they call the right script. Set up the webservice The scripts...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, Active Directory, MDT

IP Range Boundary format stored in Active Directory changed with SCCM 2007 SP2

OK, this is probably one of these articles that only a few people are interested in, but hey why not. The Internet is a mish-mash of information, so let’s add another piece to it ;-) As some of you might know, the Deployment webservice is able to identify the SCCM site code and assigned site code for a computer by querying Active Directory which is actually a nice feature as this is easier to query than the SCCM SLP. Anyway since SP2 there has been (at least) one change in the way SCCM is storing...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: SCCM, Active Directory

Finding computer in Active Directory based on the netbootGuid

A couple weeks ago I got a question from a norwegian fellow. They prestage all computers in Active Directory based on their UUID and he wanted to be able to query AD to get the computer name for their Deployments. The UUID of a computer can be stored in the Active Directory property netbootGuid . This property is e.g. also used by the RIS Deployment process. During a RIS Deployment it would be able to find an already existing computer object based on this property or create a new computer account...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Webservice, Active Directory

Making custom Database and Webservice scripts work again in MDT 2010

In MDT 2010 there has been some changes in the scripts. One of these changes was to extract the Classes regarding Data Access (Database, Webservice) into a separate script called "ZITDataAccess.vbs". If you created your own custom scripts which made use of one of these classes you need to update them to reflect this change. I will show the necessary changes by way of changing my scripts used in " Moving computer in Active Directory using a webservice ". As the MDT Team just moved...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, Active Directory, MDT 2010

Get SMS/SCCM Information from Active Directory

During Deployments (also in other situations but this Blog is more about Deployments) you sometimes need to gather some information about the existing SMS/SCCM Infrastructure. Mainly things like the SiteCode for a specific computer or even more important the assignedSiteCode (From the assigned Primary Site) and the siteServers responsible for these sites. How do we get this information? The easiest way is probably hardcoding this information somewhere. We could store it in the cs.ini if using MDT...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: SCCM, Active Directory

Moving computers in Active Directory using a webservice

If you are using GPOs in your Active Directory Environment you can come into a situation during your deployments, where the settings of a GPO might have impacts on the deployment process. To avoid this and be able to have full control on what happens during the deployment, one way to solve this problem is to have a specific OU which blocks all GPOs. I refer to this as staging OU. But this raises two other problems. When we add a new computer it's quite easy to have it added to a specific OU....  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, Active Directory

A Webservice for OSD and MDT Deployments

In the first posts I showed how you can create ( Create your own MDT Webservice - Part 1 , Create your own MDT Webservice - Part 2 ) and access ( Calling a webservice from a script using MDT 2008 ) a simple webservice to be used in Deployments to ease access to the MDT Database. In the last post you could find a complete set of stored procedures do manipulate the MDT Database on-the-fly ( Get access to the MDT Database ). Now we are going to combine this. For the ones just interested to download...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: MDT 2008, Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, SMS, Active Directory

Get Active Directory Site for IP Address

During the preparation of the SMS/SCCM Webservice for MDT/OSD Deployments I came across a problem to get the Active Directory Site for a given IP Address. There were a couple of examples available on the Internet but most of them just called the DsGetDcName API. As this is possible within the .Net Framework I personally try to avoid using a com API if using .Net. Actually the .Net Framework 2.0 contains a namespace called "System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory". So I thought it must...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Active Directory