MDT
With thanks to the 50 staff from across the University for attending please see below the links to the videos and PowerPoints of the day!
Direct link to Playlist – https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLRxbdlgJzwyjAf820T0u4GpP0E01a9LEX&v=u-GVJ_0VuRM
Slides as PowerPoint
1 Intro (4.3 MiB, 1,371 hits)
2 MDT (85.2 MiB, 1,742 hits)
3 PowerShell (27.5 MiB, 1,461 hits)
4 PRTG Network Monitor (47.5 MiB, 1,527 hits)
5 OpenVAS (32.9 MiB, 1,369 hits)
6 WSUS and Chocolatey (60.3 MiB, 1,567 hits)
7 NPS and VLANs (10.7 MiB, 1,998 hits)
Slides as PDF
1 Intro (2.0 MiB, 1,468 hits)
2 MDT (2.2 MiB, 1,828 hits)
3 PowerShell (1.8 MiB, 1,963 hits)
4 PRTG Network Monitor (3.2 MiB, 1,412 hits)
5 OpenVAS (2.3 MiB, 1,551 hits)
6 WSUS and Chocolatey (2.9 MiB, 1,781 hits)
7 NPS and VLANs (1.4 MiB, 1,873 hits)
Stay tuned over the coming days for the scripts that are mentioned through the video which will be linked to from this post.
So first things first….the title of this article is misleading; thus far Avid do not seem to have released a sounds pack specific for Sibelius 8 as you will see on the website when you login in (https://my.avid.com/account/orientation) the only option is for the 7.5 sounds pack. But…this works!
Now deploying Sibelius it’s self in a silent manner is (in my opinion) pretty well documented at this link – http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/how_to/en396971.
When you get to the sounds the documentation (again in my opinion) (which can be found here – http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/How_To/Installing-and-using-Sibelius-Sounds-across-a-network) is flaky at best not to mention the confusion around version 7/7.5/8.
For example the install path is listed as C:\Program Files (x86)\Avid\Sibelius Sounds\Sibelius 7 Sounds, well Sibelius 8 is x64 only so do we put it in the C:\Program Files folder instead? The registry entry is listed as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Avid\Sibelius Sounds\Sibelius 7 Sounds\ContentPath – well again do we update this to be ‘Sibelius 8 Sounds’?
Well as it transpires their guide is correct in all respects; however, as it states in the clear there is no silent install command for the sounds. Ultimately though its just a copy and paste operation with the addition of a registry key so lets use some PowerShell to get this software deployed! Continue reading
A silly gotcha more than anything else…. after recently updating my WSUS server to use SSL (to allow publishing through the firewall) I noticed my clients that were deployed with MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) were not installing updates as part of the Task Sequence; indeed the message log at the end indicated that the updates could not be downloaded as there was no connectivity to the WSUS server.
Lone behold I had updated the path to be https:// (against http://) in the Group Policies that pointed the clients at the WSUS server but not in the Deployment Share properties in MDT. So let the lesson be learnt… be sure to make the URL change in MDT as well as in Group Policy.
For quite some time now I’ve been a tad baffled about why the correct homepage settings are not being applied to users through group policy on first time login on recently deployed PCs. Quite often instead of reaching our intranet they are just greeted with the about:blank page.
A gpupdate /force fixes the issue quickly however naturally this is not a viable solution.
The fix took me on a tour of the Internet eventually ending up on the Microsoft Technet Forum (link) with an unlikely but correct fix of applying the ‘Disable external branding of Internet Explorer’.
You might (just like I did) instantly ignore this possible fix as you are a IT pro – you downloaded a copy of Windows 7 Enterprise from the Volume Licence Service Centre and deployed it using MDT/WDS/SCCM so where on earth could the external branding come from?
PS – A little bit more thought later on lead me to believe that it was indeed because I was using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) to deploy Windows to these PCs and MDT was indeed set to use about:blank as the default homepage (see in below screenshot sequence).
All the same this fix works and the group policy you are after can be found at User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer.
The screen shots below show this in a little more detail.
If you have ever tried to boot a VirtualBox VM into PXE (Microsoft WDS/MDT based) using the default Intel PRO/1000MT Desktop adapter you may have seen the error message
FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted.
The simple solution to this problem (and to get you booting into WDS) is to install the VirtualBox extension pack which can be found on the same download page as the VirtualBox installer (link).
This extension pack includes the required files for boot to continue normaly, a few screen shots are shown below detailing what you need to do.
This video shows how MDT and App-V can be used to get a OS installed on a PC (can use it with servers as well) in a very hands off way as well a quick over view of the key end user experience of App-V.
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