July 25, 2010
Just came back from a short trip to Seattle and have to say it’s a really nice city. Nice skyline, not to large, interesting architecture, a lot of green areas inside and around. Felt a bit like a mixture of San Francisco and New Orleans with a lot of musicians in the inner city. And by trend a lot more people are friendly. Even at the airport. The first impression you get if flying to the US is the Border Protection and their “Security Officers”. On my first trip to the US a couple years ago I made...
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July 12, 2010
Recently I found an incredible useful solution that will be able to help you troubleshooting errors and especially exceptions of web applications like the MDT Web FrontEnd (Sadly not for pure web services). One typical way of troubleshooting them is to write all important information into a log file as the Deployment web service does (see the last post for more information on the implementation of NLog in the Deployment web service ). While often pretty useful it covers just the “ expected ” part...
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Filed under: Frontend, Development
July 07, 2010
One of the most important aspects of your applications and scripts (beside their actual purpose) is to log information about the currently running actions. On daily usage it might be useful to just verify if everything is working OK, or to have some kind of reporting based on this (logparser is quite helpful for such tasks). But as soon as a problem arises, this information is of huge importance to troubleshoot the current problem. So actually you can’t log to much, only to less. Logging in...
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Filed under: Webservice, Frontend, Development
July 03, 2010
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...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Active Directory, Boot Wizard, MDT, Frontend, Development
May 17, 2010
Ok, in the last part we spend some time on the basic idea of Version Control Systems, installed a subversion server, a nice client to connect to the server and created a repository we can store our files in. Now it’s time to get some practice. The example steps shown here assume an installation as shown in the last post . And best would be if you just follow these examples on your own installation. It will take you roughly half an hour and you will be able to handle your first projects completely...
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Filed under: Development
May 16, 2010
How often did you find yourself in a situation where you “just” wanted to implement a little change or have spent hours or even weeks on work into something just to recognize that you busted it somewhere on the way? How often did something suddenly break and your colleague tells you “I haven’t done anything! For sure!!! … Oh well, I just wanted to add/change/remove …” and he is 100% sure it can’t be the reason and undoing what he did (at least the parts he can still remember) doesn’t solve the issue...
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Filed under: Development, Administration
April 30, 2010
OK, even if they have started already it’s not to late to still join this years Scripting Games . If you are like me and not yet that into PowerShell and would like to start digging more into the topic, that’s a good starting point. You have several events all covering a specific problems you experience quite often. That can be handling of files, manipulating the Registry, gathering information about the local or remote computer, handling permission, etc. The tasks required for each event differ...
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Filed under: vbscript, Powershell
April 26, 2010
Wow, great title. What does it mean? Well, yesterday I was watching a couple of the recorded sessions of last weeks MMS . One of them was held by Michael Niehaus about dynamic Deployments and he mentioned a problem you might experience mainly in ConfigMgr OSD using collection variables and presented a solution in form of a script that exists already in MDT. As I wasn’t able to find much information about this I try to summarize this in case somebody else not being able to attend his session runs...
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Filed under: SCCM, MDT
April 20, 2010
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...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard, MDT, Frontend
April 19, 2010
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...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, Microsoft Deployment, Debug, MDT, hta
April 17, 2010
While it seems as I can’t make it to this years MMS in Las Vegas due to a huge plume of volcanic ash over Europe ( BBC News: Volcanic ash - Europe flights grounded for third day ) I thought I can at least do something useful and publish an update to the Deployment Webservice with some long requested new functions. I actually just wanted to publish an update to the current version but in the end there were so many new functions requested and added that it makes more sense to increment the version...
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Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, MDT
April 11, 2010
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...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, hta, vbscript
April 08, 2010
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...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, Active Directory, MDT
April 05, 2010
One thing I really like about MDT 2010 is the implementation of Search Folders. By this highly flexible solution one can create a complete structure for several different scenarios at the same deployment share and group it for specific requests. It allows to e.g. handle 32 and 64 Bit applications in the same structure but giving a specific Task sequence only “access” to some of the folders. While this feature gives a great amount of flexibility to the Deployment workbench, the MDT Database is lacking...
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Filed under: MDT, Frontend, MDT 2010, Database
March 21, 2010
MDT has a built-in feature that allows you to install packages from SCCM on the fly during the Deployment process. More or less similar to installing applications from MDT . While this is great for dynamic deployments, it’s not that easy to use as you have to define the package with it’s package id and the program of the package to be run. A typical entry looks like MKO0023E:MDT – Install Microsoft Office 2007 I`m pretty sure that most of you that used this feature have spent already some time on...
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Filed under: SCCM, MDT, Frontend, How To
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