Windows

This post is just some notes to remind me how I like to setup a Windows 10 machine for editing scripts. Install and configure Git First step, install Git. Download the git installer . After downloading, run the installer and accept the default settings. Then add posh-git for Powershell : Open a Powershell window “as Administrator” and execute the following : set-ExecutionPolicy bypass git clone git://github.com/dahlbyk/posh-git.git cd posh-git ./install.ps1 . $PROFILE Install and configure Sublime Text Start by downloading and installing Sublime Text.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.