desktopTech

A couple of great new blogs

Two ex-colleagues have recently started up blogs of their own and I highly recommend giving them a look!

Jim Wightman recently started work for the Solutions Accelerators team at Microsoft over in Redmond (jealous? me?). Jim is a dev of the uber-geek variety! Catch his musings at either;

http://blogs.technet.com/jimw/ ---> Programming for Windows

http://blogs.msdn.com/jimwdev/ ---> Coding blog

You’ll find Jim talking all things Windows deployment development, MDT coding, Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, .Net and occasional references to Star Trek, Dr Who and his menagerie of animals!

Paul Prior is one of those people who knows everything! Now I don’t mean from a big-headed point of view…I’ve worked with him, he does! (and he will let you know!). His blog is already on my list of daily reads, just don’t tell him! If Microsoft released it, you can bet your life Paul has installed, dissected and understood it. He’s an excellent Infrastructure Consultant and part time quick and dirty dev.

Look out for all things Exchange and SharePoint amongst others at;

http://blogs.x9000.com/

2010 Scripting Games!

The 2010 Scripting Games are almost upon us. This year I'm determined to finally ditch the VBS go Powershell!

Grab this badge here!

Follow the Scripting Guys as they Tweet!

Multiple Connection issue with MDT 2010

I’ve been putting together a Replace Scenario deployment for our XP to Windows 7 migration. Working on the USMT capture and restore I came across a minor headache with connections to my deployment share. When running my initial task sequence to capture user state, after answering the various questions from the wizard, I had the message ‘A connection to the distribution share could not be made’.

After a little research it turns out MDT sometimes baulks when logging in as one user and passing different credentials to the deployment wizard or setting them in cs.ini, which is exactly what I needed to do.

The problem lies with a function in ZTIUtility.vbs. The kind MDT team over at Microsoft have come up with a fix which worked just fine in our testing!

In your deployment share, navigate to the Scripts folder. (Make a backup copy of the ZTIUtility.vbs first!) Open the file in notepad and replace the following code in the MapNetworkDriveEX function:

Case Else
' Case &h800704C3 ' Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed.
' Case &h8007052E ' Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.
' There was a some kind of fatal error.
If ErrDesc <> "" then
MapNetworkDriveEx = ErrDesc
Else
MapNetworkDriveEx = "Unable to map UNC Path " & sShare & " :" & "( 0x" & hex(HasError) & " ) "
End if
oLogging.CreateEntry MapNetworkDriveEx & "", iLogType
Exit function
End select

With this code

Case Else
Err.Clear
On Error Resume Next
oNetwork.MapNetworkDrive chr(sDrive)&":", sShare, False
HasError = err.number
ErrDesc = err.Description
On Error Goto 0
If Err.Number <> 0 Then
' There was a some kind of fatal error.
             If ErrDesc <> "" then
                                        MapNetworkDriveEx = ErrDesc
             Else
                                        MapNetworkDriveEx = "Unable to map UNC Path " & sShare & " :" & "( 0x" & hex(HasError) & " ) "
             End if
             oLogging.CreateEntry MapNetworkDriveEx & "", iLogType
                           Exit function
Else
      Exit Function
End If
End select

The original posting can be read at the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit Team Blog.

Look at the basics first!

Hands up who’s spent hours or days troubleshooting a problem, digging into the AD, ripping the code apart, testing, re-testing, blaming others, drinking more coffee…only to find out… well, the answer is too embarrassing to speak of!

I’ve been having issues getting my MDT builds to drop into a Specific OU, Workstation to be precise. The builds would deploy but ZTIDomainJoin would throw a wobbler at the Apply Network Settings phase. I’d ploughed through BDD.log, NetSetup.log, I’d checked and rechecked my Customsettings.ini syntax;

MachineObjectOU=ou=workstations,dc=mydomain,dc=net

I had checked and rechecked my account permissions to the Workstation OU but still it failed. If I removed the MachineObjectOU value, as expected the client dropped nicely into the default Computers container.

Ok, so has anyone spotted my blindingly obvious error?

Workstation IS NOT THE SAME AS Workstations!

doh!

And the moral of this? Look at the basics before deep diving into everything else.

A Remote Desktop Connection Annoyance!

For a while now I’ve often been frustrated by a trivial annoyance when I tried to remotely connect to my lab servers using RDC. When I come to login, the “Ease of Access’ window would open as I typed my password.

After living with this for a while I thought, I really should find out why this is happening! It turns out the shortcut for Ease of Access is Windows Key + U, as I was entering the letter U the window was popping up. It would seem my RDC session had the Windows Key on hence my pressing of U activated the application. A quick press of the Windows Key and all was fixed. Maybe next time I should sort out the trivial issues as well!

Technorati Tags: RDC,Remote Desktop Connection,Ease of Access,Windows Key

Windows 7 Issue with Group Policy Enforced Wallpaper

If you are having issues after using the group policy setting User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Desktop\Desktop\Desktop Wallpaper whereby the desktop wallpaper isn't applied and a solid background is displayed instead, then check out this posting from The Deployment Guys for some insight.

http://blogs.technet.com/deploymentguys/archive/2009/11/20/windows-7-rtm-issue-with-group-policy-enforced-wallpaper.aspx

Understanding the MDT 2010 Configuration Database

The guys at Xtreme have done it again, another great posting on the the MDT database. Part 1 covers the hows and whys of getting it configured with some basic fields and the equivalent in CustomSettings.ini.

http://deployment.xtremeconsulting.com/2009/11/24/understanding-the-mdt-configuration-database-part-1/