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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.

According to this document from Apple : http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4176 You may have trouble using the Directory Utility if your domain is setup such that the Netbios name and host name are not the same. This is the situation I find myself in, so I thought I would post a sample script to help others out… The script can be found here

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.

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.

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