Getting Started with The Luggage

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When administering and or deploying Mac OS systems, it becomes very useful to be able to create packages.  This can be to repackage an app to automate deployment, or package up scripts or configuration files.  One such tool to do this is The Luggage.  Written by Joe Block, it is a command line tool that makes use of Apple’s Packagemaker as well as Make.  More information can be found here.

This post is intended to walk you through getting up and running with luggage from ground zero.  A future post will look at using The Luggage.  This tutorial is assuming you are running Mac OS 10.7. Continue reading →

What the heck are Directory Junction Points?

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So I recently fielded a question from someone new to Windows 7 about some “directories” that they were being denied access to.  This seemed odd, because it was under the user profile so they should not have been a permissions issue.

I inquired about some more specifics, and the list of problem directories were Application Data, Cookies, Local Settings, etc…  I recognized right away that these were Windows XP directories which should not normally show up for a user in Windows 7.  What these really are is Directory Junction points provided by Microsoft to maintain compatibility with software written for previous versions of Windows.  Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft changed the structure of the user profile namespace.  The result of this is that Directory Junction points are needed to route files to the new locations even when the old style path is specified. Continue reading →

Troubleshooting MDT Deployments

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So, a colleague hands me two laptops that are going to be added to our loaner pool.  No problem…  just add the the computer’s information into the MDT database and image them.

Both machines were taking quite a long time for the wizard to come up, and when it did it was obvious that none of the values from the database were coming down.  Both machines were connecting to the deployment share, and had valid IP addresses.  I even booted up a Virtual Machine I use for testing and verified that it was connecting to the database properly.  So what the heck is up with the two problem machines? Continue reading →

Added a Resources Page

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My intent with this blog is to post information that is not readily available elsewhere.  I do not feel the need to duplicate a lot of the great information that is already available.  With that in mind, I have added a Resources page with links to a number of sites that I have found helpful.  Most of these are sites I find myself visiting frequently.

Changing the OS Associated with a Task Sequence

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This is something that bugged me for a while, and I just stumbled across an answer…

When you create a new “Standard Client Task Sequence” to deploy an OS, the first thing you are prompted for after choosing the template is the OS.  I wanted to know how to specify a different OS for an existing task Sequence.   The obvious scenario for this would be when have updated a reference image but do not want to recreate a custom task sequence.

Continue reading →

Problem Updating Deployment Share

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I have had an issue where I was no longer able to update my deployment share to update my boot images.  If I installed MDT on another computer and connected to the share, I could then do the update, so the problem is not with the share itself but with the computer doing the updating.

I had tried uninstalling WAIK and then reinstalling it, but that did not help.  I did some googling and did not come up with anything either…  I was suspecting that some temp files were a problem, so I started poking around.  When I looked in Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp I found some directories named MDTUpdate.XXX that were rather large.

For some reason I could not delete these files.  I finally had to boot to a live CD to delete the files.  Once I deleted these files, I could update my Deployment Share again.

Application Bundles in MDT 2010

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In MDT 2010, you can create application bundles.  An application bundle is simply a list of dependencies or a list of applications to be installed.  In this example, an application bundle can be used to bundle 32bit and 64bit versions of an application.  Here is how to do this :

We will assume that we have set up both the 32bit and 64bit version of the software.  In this example I am using AVG

Now we need to limit the platform that each application can install on.  This is done on the Details tab of the application properties.  To limit to only 32 bit versions of Windows, we select “All x86 Pre-Vista” and “All x86 Vista and Newer”  This will cover all 32 bit version of Windows.  For the 64 bit version of the software, we simply choose the corresponding x64 options. Continue reading →