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It’s not hard to find discussions online about installing SPSS silently. I have a working install based on this discussion . I needed to re-license a number of machines with a new authorization code and had a bit of trouble, so I thought I’d write it up… I built a payload free package with The Luggage to distribute with Munki, and my first attempt at the postinstall script looked like this :

Recently I wanted to be able to sign a package that I was building with The Luggage. Since The Luggage is calling pkgbuild to build the package, I took a look at the pkgbuild documentation and determined that the following argument was needed : --sign "Common name of signing cert" The question then became : how to add this to my Makefile? Taking a look at luggage.make I saw that PB_EXTRA_ARGS is the variable used to contain the arguments for the pkgbuild command.

Mac OS X ships with the vim editor, which supports syntax highlighting. By default, however, syntax highlighting is not turned on. Fortunately it is not hard to enable it. Settings for vim are controlled by two files, one controlling settings globally and the other controlling settings for the user. /usr/share/vim/vimrc is the file that will control the global settings. changes made to this file will affect all users of the machine.

In my organization, we are using Bitlocker to encrypt Windows 7 computers. We are storing the recovery keys in Active Directory, this stores the key as an attribute of the computer object. I recently wanted to generate a report of the bitlocker status of the computer objects in AD. I found out I could do this pretty easily in Powershell, and thought I would document that here. My inspiration for this script came from this Technet Gallery script To start, we need the Quest ActiveRoles Management Shell for for Active Directory.

I a previous post , I detailed how to get the Bitlocker wizard page to appear when deploying Windows 8 pro. I recently confirmed another case where the wizard does not show up. I became aware of this thread on Technet because another user linked to my previously mentioned blog post. I was able to confirm after a bit of testing, that when using the Windows 8 Enterprise evaluation media, MDT does not show the Bitlocker wizard page.

In my recent rework of my Build and Capture sequences that are used for updating my reference images, I thought it would be nice to have an email notification when the process was done. This post is to show how I did this. I did this using Powershell’s Send-MailMessage cmdlet. This provides a simple way to send a message via SMTP, and this MDT 2012u1 provides support for Powershell scripts it seemed a logical choice.

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.