When you’ve done as much ConfigMgr 2007 Operating System Deployment as I have (and even if you haven’t!) it becomes rapidly obvious that things don’t always go to plan on the first go. Generally, when creating new OSD Task Sequences, I’m plagued by one or two minor errors that need a little investigation.
Thankfully (or not, depending on how you like looking at log files) ConfigMgr 2007 logs everything. Unfortunately, when in WinPE mode for OSD, reading those log files can be a real pain in the behind. Trace32 (and the relatively recent Trace64 for our 64 bit counterparts) were never included in WinPE boot media, which is a tad odd considering the requirement for it.
Fear not, as it is totally possible to integrate Trace into your own boot image. I tend to do this whenever I’m working on a customer OSD engagement as it makes my life, and more importantly, the customers life much easier. No more trawling through Notepad .log files people – upgrade your boot images now! Read the rest of this entry »
Whenever I perform a new installation of ConfigMgr for a customer, one post-deployment task at the top of my agenda is the integration of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Update 1.
The process to integrate MDT is extremely straight forward and takes two minutes – but the advantages it brings to Operating System Deployment are huge! Some of my favourites are:
So what are you waiting for, let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »
In some environments there is a requirement to ensure the local administrator account is renamed to something other than the default ‘Administrator’. The prime reason for this is security. It makes a hackers life just a touch easier if he knows the default administrators username. For this reason, it’s common practice to rename it to something else.
There are two ways to achieve this in a Windows environment. Firstly, you can configure a Group Policy to do just that. Secondly, you can rename the account as part of your Operating System Deployment. The latter is what I’m interested in.
You can achieve this by adding a new step into your OSD Task Sequence. I place this at the very end of my Task Sequence to ensure it gets applied after any administrator related tasks. The computer is then set to reboot afterewards to ensure it is applied successfully.
Add a Run Command Line step into your Task Sequence and add the following code to the Command Line text box.
wmic UserAccount where Name="Administrator" call Rename Name="NewName"
Change “NewName” to whatever you want the administrator account to be renamed to and save the Task Sequence. Your local administrator account will now be renamed accordingly as part of your Operating System Deployment. I haven’t tried myself, but I’d imagine you could run this step as part of your build and capture Task Sequence. In theory, this should eliminate the need to add the step to each of your OSD Task Sequences.
Whilst recently configuring Windows Deployment Services on a Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise SP2 system, I noticed the error code 0xE0000102 appear while running through the server configuration. The configuration bombs out and you are left with an unconfigured WDS server.
I think I have this one nailed. It seems that if your system had Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 installed before you joined a domain, you will hit this error.
I noticed this in my lab environment, where I commonly build a virtual server template with 2003 R2 SP2. All new servers are cloned from there. Once the clone is created, I join them to a domain if required, so SP2 exists prior to domain joining.
The answer? Remove SP2, reboot, reinstall.