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Executing Web services – a generic MDT script

As a frequent reader of this blog you have probably seen already a couple posts where we had to execute a web service to accomplish a certain task or get a specific value, etc. MDT itself takes away a lot of the hassle you have to deal with normally, if working with web services. In their easiest way, you simply define the complete web service call in the customsettings.ini and let the Gather step do it’s magic. But sometimes this isn’t enough as we need to call these web services at a later point...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, 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

PrettyGoodFrontEndClone

I’ve always been a big fan of the PrettyGoodFrontEnd written by Johan Arwidmark . Originally written as a FrontEnd for ZTI deployments on SMS with BDD 2007 it has recently been updated for ConfigMgr (SCCM) 2007 Deployments with MDT 2010 integration. Similar to the Custom Boot Wizard I’ve mentioned already a couple times on this blog, Johan is now also using webservices to query the necessary information from MDT, Active Directory and ConfigMgr (SCCM). For this he wrote his own webservice reduced...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard, MDT, Frontend

Testing your Wizard files, Gather steps, customsettings.ini, etc

As you might have read already on other Blogs as well, it is quite easy to test the processing of your gather step and the customsettings.ini. What I would like to add here is, that you can also use the same way to test your custom wizards and scripts as well. It’s easy to set up: - Create a folder that you would like to use for Testing/Debug purposes (“MDT_Testing” or similar). You can also create several folders if you require to test different scenarios - Copy the following files from the {MDTInstallationDirectoy...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Custom Scripts, Microsoft Deployment, Debug, MDT, hta

”Invalid character” error in vbs script referenced by hta

Today I experienced a problem that was running me mad. I was working on a modification of an existing hta downloaded from the internet (more on this later ;-) ). The first time I ran it to verify the changes made so far, I got a Script Error stating an invalid character in Line 1, Char 1 in a script that was referenced in the hta: I was pretty sure that the mentioned script was OK as it is a core library I’ve used quite often before. But to be sure I checked the script again if it contains any invalid...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Custom Scripts, hta, vbscript

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

Create your custom Boot Wizard - Execute the Wizard, process the results and create the Boot Image

In the last two articles Create your custom Boot Wizard - some advanced stuff and Create your own Boot Wizard - Display dynamic data we created a Custom Boot Wizard which requests a list of available OSD Task Sequences (we actually get the collections the Task Sequences are advertised to) and shows this dynamic list to the user to chose from. In this article we now will create a script which will call our custom Boot Wizard and process the results of the users choice. If you deploy a Boot Image via...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: MDT 2008, Custom Scripts, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard

Create your custom Boot Wizard - Display dynamic data

What we are trying to built here is a Boot Wizard which will show a dynamic list of available OSD Task Sequences from SCCM 2007 to choose from. The chosen Task Sequence shall then be executed on the local computer. To ease our job regarding the final deployment and the management of the Boot Images, we want to have a single Boot Image to be used for WDS/PXE/CD Deployment for all known and unknown computers. In the last article ( Create your custom Boot Wizard - some advanced stuff ) we dived into...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: MDT 2008, Custom Scripts, Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard

Debugging VBScript and JScript in vbs, js, wsf and hta files

Many of us have to deal with some kind of scripts. I know the future is Powershell but there are still so many existing scripts flying around and also there are some situations where you simply need to use something "old" like vbscript. Anyway. I'm not going to talk about the why and why not. This is simply about the fact that I had to deal with vbscript quite a lot, especially in the last time due to some Deployments (Hey Microsoft! When will Windows PE support .Net?). As writing on...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Custom Scripts, Debug

Update Computerinformation in MDT 2008

Now as we know how to create our own webservice and how to use it from a script , we can go ahead to the more useful topics. We actually want to extend the current MDT implementation. So I would like to start with a function which was already quite useful on a couple of different implementations. We want to have an easy way to update the Computer information, mainly Serial Number, MAC Address and UUID. The benefit might not be obvious but to give you an example. We use this to prestage a computer...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: MDT 2008, Custom Scripts, Webservice, SQL

Calling a webservice from a script using MDT 2008

The MDT Development Team did a great job on writing their “UnknownComputer” Webservice. But they also wrote the corresponding scripts which enables you to use almost any Webservice from any script without much effort. Why would we need webservices you might ask. Well, it just gives you another way of getting or transforming values. Sometimes webservices already exists, sometimes the security settings can be difficult to get access to sql servers or it is just easier to implement a special function...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: MDT 2008, Custom Scripts, Webservice