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Todd's Tips for System Adminstrators

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Update 1 Released

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I received an email yesterday letting me know that Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 has been released.

Check out the Springboard Series Blog for information on the new features. Highlights for me are:

  • support for Microsoft Office 2010
  • improved driver importing
  • cosmetic changes to the UI

Support for Office 2010 is pretty simple; there is no need to explain. The improved driver importing is something I found helpful in my environment. What MDT does now is check the drivers and see what platforms they support rather rely on what the drivers say they support. The benefit of this is that you will have less deployment problems. I have imported drivers that stated they were 64 bit. MDT checked them and said (rough translation):

“Even though ACME Corp says they are 64 bit, these are 32 bit.”

It’s nice to have the deployment environment checking that for you.

The other change is the update to the environment. Gone is the guy helping the lady with the computer.Now we just have a basic blue screen, throughout the prompts. Of course, you can change the picture and make it whatever you want.

Looking for the download, go to the MDT Download Center page.

Get on the Bus Tour – Montreal

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100_0695I had a chance last week to head up to Montreal and check out and help out at the Get on the Bus tour being sponsored by Microsoft.

The event started for us at 8:00am, which for me meant a 3:30am start from Kingston. I drove to Brockville and picked up David Myers and the two of us headed to Montreal. Thank goodness David picked up coffee for the ride. We arrived at the venue around 8:15 and were put to work guiding people. David and I had emailed the organizers and offered our assistance. As a leader of a user group in Kingston, I know it never hurts to have extra hands helping out.

I finished up guiding people and arrived into the theatre at around 9:20 and the Keynote was in full swing. One of the many technologies I perked up for was the Intune beta that is running right now.  For a small to medium sized business, it has great promise to help you manage your environment.

After the keynote, Office 2010 was covered off and we were presented some of the features of using Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 in the cloud. It definitely got me thinking on how I could use this in my environment at work; it will make life easier.

After this session Daniel Nerenberg came up and talked about App-V and Med-V. Both are virtualization technologies but very different. I will try to explain at a very high level. App-V virtualizes apps, Med-V virtualizes a Windows XP operating system which can be managed centrally.

After Daniel, Stephen Rose came up and talked about Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Beta 1. Stephen is a high energy speaker and you could really feel the energy in room  climb as he spoke. It was a great overview of the capabilities of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. It also showed that there are FREE tools available to help make your life easier.

After Stephen’s session, there was an Ask the Experts session. This is a photo from the session (the room was dark, so this was about the best shot I could get.)

It was well worth the time to drive up to Montreal and check out the tour. The sessions are great and if you haven’t seen Office 2010 or MDT 2010, be prepared to be awed. If the tour is coming to your neck of the woods, be sure to get out and check out the event.

Tools and information can be found, starting at the Microsoft Springboard Site,  www.microsoft.com/springboard

Pause Task Sequence in MDT 2010

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With a new year comes new images for my MDT servers. At TechDays in Ottawa, I presented the MDT session in the client track on Day 1. Afterwards, I had some great discussions with a few people from major Canadian government offices. One of my challenges has been how to add extra software to an image which doesn’t have a great silent install. What I had been doing was building the machine using MDT, then when it was done, adding unfriendly software, patches, etc. to the build after. This is a pain as you have to then Sysprep the image, boot into a Windows PE environment then capture the image using ImageX.

The people I met spend the majority of their day building images. For me, I do this a couple of times of year. They had some great experiences which they shared and one of those things was a pause task sequence routine they are using. What it is a call to pause the machine sequence build. Some of them are using a VBscript which essential calls notepad and leaves it open while you do all the extra work you need to do. When you close notepad, MDT continues on with its task sequence. Also new to MDT 2010 is a script called LTISuspend.wsf.

The method I chose was to create a batch file called pausetask.bat with one line:

START /WAIT Notepad.exe .\SomeTextFile.txt

Then, I saved it in a folder and created a new application called Pause Task Sequence – Notepad. Here is a snapshot of the properties of the application.

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Application Properties Snapshot

Next thing you want to do is ensure that the pause task runs on your fresh builds. On my Windows 7 install task (and I should note, this works with all versions of Windows you can deploy with MDT, even Windows XP), I added an install application task to my task sequence. To do this, click Add and general and Install Application. I add the new task sequence right after I install my applications.

Microsoft Deployment Toolkt (MDT) 2010 Add New Task Sequence Install Application Snapshot

As long as I keep notepad open, the task sequence pauses to let me do other things. I was able to install some custom line of business applications to my builds yesterday and install Windows Updates prior to capturing the image. You can even reboot the computer and as long as you don’t manually close notepad, the computer reboots and notepad pops back up, continuing to pause the MDT task sequence.

If you want to use the new method of calling LTISuspend.wsf in MDT 2010 then add a command line task instead of an install application task.

Microsoft Deployment Toolkt (MDT) 2010 Add New Task Sequence Run Command Line Snapshot

In the command line enter 

cscript.exe %SCRIPTROOT%\LTISuspend.wsf

Microsoft Deployment Toolkt (MDT) 2010 Properties of Run Command Line Task Snapshot

Then when this one executes, the LTI process suspends, you do what ever you need to do and then when you are ready to continue on, you click a desktop shortcut to resume the process.

While there is a capture image task sequence now part of MDT 2010 as well, capturing the image while building the computer is the preferred option.

A couple of articles to check out on this subject:

http://blogs.technet.com/deploymentguys/archive/2008/07/07/useful-script-number-6-pausing-the-task-sequence.aspx

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/33524765/how-to-pause-the-capture.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/mniehaus/archive/2009/06/27/mdt-2010-new-feature-3-suspend-and-resume-a-lite-touch-task-sequence.aspx