Brain Dump

OSD didn’t complete, had to force quit, now I can’t deploy any software! >:(

Posted on July 13, 2011 by Matt

Had a frustrating set of events. I’ll start by admitting that it is all my fault. Basically I had to terminate an Operating System Deployment Task Sequence when it was installing a piece of software because SCCM was waiting for the machine to reboot. Something was wrong in the restart flag and it never restarted the machine.

To speed the imaging up we forced the machines to reboot before erroring out because the install software task was set to error after 2 hours of sitting idle (MS Default). Problem being, when we started the machines up, and logged in everything appeared to be fine but I couldn’t get software deployed from SCCM. I could see that the machine grabbed the advertised software, but none seemed to start the download.

After a bit of Googling by my fearless right hand man (thanks Nate) he came up with the issue. A registry entry that flags the completion of an OSD deployment and then allows other SCCM tasks to proceed.

SO if you quit an OSD SCCM task and then can’t get the machine to install software in an automated fasion you should check this registry entry:

\HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\CCM\CCMExec\ProvisioningMode
(Should be set to ‘false’ if OSD complete successfully. If it is set to ‘true’ this is part of the problem.)
In the same location a key named SystemTaskExcludes should be void of any entry, anything in that key can be deleted.

Once those changes were made I was able to continue with automated software installs.

***Important note: 64 bit systems have a different key location which is here: HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\CCM\CCMExec\

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

eXtreme Outer Vision – eXtreme tools for computer enthusiasts

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Matt

Ever wanted to know how large a power supply to purchase?

I did too, I found the answer here:

eXtreme Outer Vision – eXtreme tools for computer enthusiasts.

Thanks eXtreme Power Supply Calculator peeps!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Automatically Start Windows 7 Media Center in Live TV Mode – How-To Geek

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Matt

This was helpful recently with setting up some kiosk style displays.

Automatically Start Windows 7 Media Center in Live TV Mode – How-To Geek.

Matt

Posted in Computing, Microsoft | Tagged Auto Start, Automate, Media Center, Windows 7 | Leave a comment

Windows AIK: Add and Remove Drivers Offline

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Matt

Ever wanted to know how to inject drivers into a wim file offline?

Here is how: Add and Remove Drivers Offline.

Posted in Computing, Microsoft | Tagged Drivers, Image, Imaging, SCCM | Leave a comment

SCCM and no Federation Server…

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Matt

There is a patch (kb974571) that was applied to secure communications on a windows network. In most intsances this patch is something you would want to apply. I’ve found an instance where you don’t want this patch pushed.

When a person is setting up an SCCM server for deploying images, using OSD task sequences, something to look out for is an issue I just ran into. I was recieving an odd error, with no real leads to go on after a significant amount of web searching, when I stumbled upon the fix on MS’ site. I need to uninstall kb974571 in order to allow plain ol http communication. Once I uninstalled the patch the task image was found, downloaded, and the machine was able to proceed.

Super cool eh? No federation server, but using SCCM, don’t install kb9745712!

Read about it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2028442

Another note, if you’re setting up Office Communication Server, without a Federation Server, you’ll run into a similar issue.

Posted in Computing, Microsoft | Tagged SCCM | Leave a comment

AutoLogin Win 7 Pro or Enterprise

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Matt

Because I keep looking for this; here is what to know about how to setup auto login on a Vista or Win 7 Box.

Change Registry key

HKEYLOCALMachine/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/WinLogon/

Autoadminlogon value needs to be set to 1.

Then, when you run control userpassword2 in the run command you’ll see a checkbox that wasn’t there previously. It says something about users entering a user name and password to use the computer, uncheck it, and when you close that window you’ll be prompted for the account to auto login!

Voila!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Re: The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Matt

I found an interesting set of articles on Anandtech.com to do with Solid State Hard drives, and some of their limitations.

The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News.

To summarize; SSDs have a limited number of writes to each individual cell – 10,000 writes to be exact. Due to the way that NAND Flash memory works overall speed slowly decreases and in order to mitigate immediate drive failures there is some computer trickery that takes place.

Continue reading →

Posted in Computing | Tagged Hard Drives, SSD | Leave a comment

Apple, Dual Boot, Bootcamp Drivers, and how much they still stink.

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Matt

For the past several months I’ve been working on dual boot systems at Champlain College. Two years ago I setup a lab with this functionality on a set of iMacs. I’ve struggled throughout this whole time to identify different issues with these machines, almost all of it is driver related.

During the winter break I was asked to deploy a dual boot setup to a set of Mac Pro’s. The X58 motherboard with dual Xeon 2.8 Ghz and a 512mb ATI Radeon 4870 video card would seem to me to be a killer machine. The X58 chipset is a known quantity in the PC world, the ATI card is very similar to the one I use at home and above all, Apple has already provided a driver set for their modified hardware. I was thinking – Piece of cake!

Not quite.

Continue reading →

Posted in Apple, Computing, Microsoft | Tagged Apple, Bootcamp, Drivers, Dual Boot | Leave a comment

DevCon (Part of Windows Driver Kit)

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Matt

A while back I ran into an issue where a device driver was installed and causing a conflict with another device. This had happened due to a motherboard swap and while I’m a little fuzzy on exactly what the issue was I know that the gist was that I couldn’t see the device causing the issue in device manager. It was related to the NIC and I think stemmed from the fact that the computer thought the old NIC was present, and caused a conflict with the new NIC.

This is where the DevCon tool comes in. This handy little fella lets you query the machine and will show you information that you may not be able to find in the device manager.

I also want to add the caveat that this is an extremely powerful tool and only for more advanced windows users.

DevCon (Windows Driver Kit).