Custom OSD Scripting - Introduction
Having started working with the Configuration Manager OSD functionality a several months back a few things became quickly apparent
- While the OS deployment process works well, there are many tailored settings that can not be achieved natively out of the product.
- The product is very conducive to overcoming this through custom scripting and is actually quite extensible when doing so.
Through my time spent on myitforum.com and technet I come across many people with the same requirements or desires from the product and have decided to lay out what I have done to customize the OSD imaging process. Over the next few post I will highlight some of my scripts and try to explain what is going on inside.
** Disclaimer – I am an amateurish scripter. Sure I am getting better over the years, but by no means am I any kind of scripting authority. Also the environment in which I work is somewhat of a mess due to internal and external constraints. I’ve had to account for this mess in some of these scripts, what may seams a roundabout way of achieving something may actually be by design.
With all of that said – here is a bit of the foundation. I am using SCCM OSD with the MDT integration. Everything I have done has been with MDT integration; however I believe it should all work fine without the MDT. I started my OSD modification by examining and borrowing some from Johan Arwidmark’s “Pretty Good Frontend script" for BDD 2007. Throughout my blogs I will refer to my .HTA scripts as the Front End, and to any other scripts as the Back End. Finally here is one must read article - About Task Sequence Variables, and also a list of native OSD Task Sequence variables - (this can come in handy).
I hope to have my next post up shortly which will look at a very basic yet useful Front End script.
neilp