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I am currently re-reading John Lienhard’s The Engines of Our Ingenuity and I came across this nugget that I think we can apply to IT. We must teach students that someone else’s subject matter is not a black box, that those boxes can and must be opened. What one fool can do, another fool can also do, and any student is smart enough to open any other student’s black box. That in turn brings us back to the matter of systems.

Using MDT 2012 Update 1 with ADK, I built and captured a Windows 8 Pro image to enable my institution to more easily do some testing with Windows 8. After setting up a task sequence to deploy this reference image I noticed something unexpected. When choosing the Win 8 task sequence, I was not presented with the Bitlocker wizard pane. The wizard pane was showing up fine for my Win 7 task sequences.

Previously, I showed how to install Luggage, and how to package a drag and drop app . In this installment, we will look at how to package up a LaunchAgent script. We will work with a simple script to mount a couple of file shares when a user logs into their computer. To set it up as a LaunchAgent, we need two pieces. First, the script itself (connectshares.sh) needs to be copied to /Library/Scripts/Myorg and everyone should have read and execute permissions.

The Novell ZCM Adaptive Agent is an example of an application that needs to be installed at deployment time and should not be included in the reference image. In general, MDT Lite Touch handles installing applications at deployment time quite nicely. The Adaptive agent, however is an example of an install process that does not play nice with MDT. It really is a quite horrible installer. First, lets take a look at the installer and what it does.

I had a need for a user friendly Windows script to map network drives using credentials supplied by the user. The script I endend up with is an HTA script that allows the user to enter their credentials and map a predefined set of network drives. There is also a button to disconnect the mapped drives. The script is here : https://github.com/vmiller/ConnectDrives <!-- HTA script to allow machines that are not joined to a domain to access Windows file shares with domain credentials.

In a previous post , I showed how to get started by getting Luggage setup. In this post we will create a simple package based on a .app bundle. Drag and drop applications are really user friendly to install, the user simply needs to drag them to the Applications folder. They are not as nice, however, for the system administrator who wishes to deploy the application via some automated tool. In some cases it is desirable to repackage these application into an installer package.

I’ve been working with MDT 2012 in my test environment, and here are three new features that I really like. Dirty Environment Cleanup Some times a deployment fails from some reason, and you just want to restart the process of a bare metal install. In MDT 2010, the task sequence would read the logs written to the hard drive and realize that a deployment was still in progress. At this point, MDT 2010 will halt the process with an error.

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 .

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.

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.