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Om Ronnie Jakobsen

Twitter: @RonnieJakobsen

To OOBE or not to OOBE

In my most recent customer project I was building a Windows 10 1803 reference image.For this build I came across a kind of strange issue.When deploying the reference image using SCCM, I got a weird error right at the end of the task sequence.If I clicked Try again Windows would do something for a few seconds and then the task sequence would finish like nothing went wrong.And the odd thing was that nothing seemed to be wrong, everything worked.But the error would pop up every single time and that was not something I could ignore.So I google’d and chased all [...]

By |2018-07-31T14:10:31+01:00juli 31st, 2018|Configuration Manager (SCCM), Operating Systems, OS Deployment|Kommentarer lukket til To OOBE or not to OOBE
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Create ConfigurationItems and Baselines without killing your mouse

This information applies to ConfigMgr version 1710 and later. One of the things I really love about working in IT is that you can learn new stuff all the time, and when new stuff turns into boring repetitive stuff you can apply automation and add yet another new piece of learning to your skillset. Over the last few releases of Configuration Manager, the product team has added some new cmdlets for managing Configuration Items and Baselines, and I started to look into these when I was given the task to create a lot of very similar CIs and Baselines for [...]

By |2017-12-18T07:32:48+01:00december 18th, 2017|Automation, Configuration Manager (SCCM), Powershell, Uncategorized|6 Comments
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Disable Onedrive Updates from a Task Sequence

In order to fully control OneDrive updates I was tasked to find a method to disable OneDrive from doing updates on its own. Given that there is no registry setting or GPO that allow you to disable automatic updates from happening I was forced to look for other methods. The update check is performed by a Scheduled Task that runs once every day If you look in the Scheduled Task manager you will find one or two tasks related to OneDrive. So in order to prevent OneDrive from doing any updates I first tried to delete any tasks related to [...]

By |2017-08-22T10:30:37+01:00april 18th, 2017|Configuration Manager (SCCM)|Kommentarer lukket til Disable Onedrive Updates from a Task Sequence
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DHCP Guide

This document describes common scenarios for implementing DHCP in relation to PXE boot with particular focus on Configuration Manager. Assumptions and audience Audience must familiar with basic IP networking principles. The background In order for a client to perform a PXE boot, there must be a DHCP service available, this is not required to be a Microsoft DHCP service. Any DHCP server is good. The following diagram shows a typical network setup In this case the client and the server is on the same network, which is the simplest setup you will come across, normally the setup will be more [...]

By |2016-02-08T14:07:39+01:00februar 8th, 2016|Configuration Manager (SCCM), OS Deployment, Windows Server|1 Kommentar
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Hardware overview with Power BI

In the true spirit of christmas, I will share some cool tricks on how to get deeper into Power BI. My good friend and collegue Henrik Hoe started out by showing a little bit on how to get started with Power BI, I will extend upon that and show you how easily create a live view of SCCM inventory data. First of all, we need to have Power BI Dekstop installed. For easy access to my SCCM database I installed it on my SCCM Primary Site (it is a test environment so that okay, but normally you would not do [...]

By |2017-08-22T09:57:20+01:00december 21st, 2015|Visualization|2 Comments
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Deploying Office 2016 with SCCM 2012

Follow this simple guide to get your Office 2016 deployment up and running with SCCM 2012 R2 First we need to download the Office 2016 Deployment Tool from Microsoft You can find it here Run the tool and install it to a location of your liking, I choose e:\temp\Office 2016 When you look in that folder you'll find a setup.exe and a sample configuration file. Download the content In order to download the Office 2016 installation files, we first need to create a download file So fire up your favorite text editor and enter the following <Configuration> <Add SourcePath="e:\temp\office2016\x64 EN" [...]

By |2015-09-29T23:52:47+01:00september 29th, 2015|Configuration Manager (SCCM)|21 Comments
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Windows 10 Preview Start Menu not working in build 9926

A quick fix to the StartMenu issue in Windows 10 Technical Preview Build 9926 During deployment of your Windows 10 image, you can fix this issue by prepping the default user profile, so that all users logging on to the device will benefit from the fix. In the registry key HKEY_USERS\.Default\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced Create a REG_DWORD with the name EnableXamlStartMenu Set the value to 0 (zero) Or simply use this command to do it during a Task Sequence reg.exe add hku\.Default\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced /v EnableXamlStartMenu /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

By |2015-02-15T18:28:51+01:00februar 15th, 2015|Configuration Manager (SCCM), OS Deployment, Windows Client|Kommentarer lukket til Windows 10 Preview Start Menu not working in build 9926
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Get Direct Collection Memberships And Machine Variables Information

On several occasions I have had the need to pull information on SCCM devices, and recently I was asked to do a backup of all client direct memberships and some specific machine variables. So I thought I would share my latest version of a script that does that. The script takes an argument that will allow you to limit the process to only a set of named clients or just one if you prefer. Param($clients) The script starts by create a class to contain the information pulled from SCCM, making it easier to work with afterwards. Add-Type -Language CSharpVersion3 @" [...]

By |2014-12-10T00:02:00+01:00december 10th, 2014|Configuration Manager (SCCM), General info, Powershell|Kommentarer lukket til Get Direct Collection Memberships And Machine Variables Information
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Store encrypted password in a PowerShell script

I write a lot of PowerShell scripts where I need to access different kinds of services, servers and databases. Often these scripts needs to run on schedules in the background and so on. Instead of having cleartext passwords scattered throughout the scriptfile I like to store a securestring version of the password in the script. Normally you would build a credential object using something like this $username = "domain\admin" $password = "password" | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force $cred = New-Object -typename System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -argumentlist $username, $password That means that anyone who can open and read the scriptfile, will know what the password [...]

By |2017-09-07T22:55:56+01:00september 10th, 2014|Powershell|17 Comments
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Generate Random Timeslot for scheduled tasks

I was tasked to create a PS script that created a Windows Server Backup policy with a random start time I came up with the following script for the random start time bits. function Get-TimeSlot($startTime, $EndTime) { $timeslots = @() for ($i = $startTime; $i -ne $EndTime; $i++) { if ($i -eq 24) { $i = 0 } $timeslots += $i } $timeslot = "$(Get-Random $timeslots):00" return $timeslot } Get-TimeSlot -startTime 20 -EndTime 4 There might be a more Powershell’ish way of doing this, but it gets the job done.

By |2018-01-24T23:11:07+01:00september 10th, 2014|Powershell|3 Comments
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Capture output from command line tools with PowerShell

A simple task and then again not A customer asked me if it was possible to grab output from a command and analyze the output afterwards. In the particular case he needs to call a telnet session and check if there was a proper response from the server. The easy solution and then again not The very simple solution would be to start the command from PowerShell, redirecting the output to a file, wait for the process to finish and then read the file content. But in this case the process would not end on its own, as the telnet [...]

By |2018-01-24T23:02:52+01:00januar 16th, 2014|Powershell|9 Comments
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Case of the missing Hardware Inventory

I recently played around with adding registry data to SCCM Hardware Inventory using RegKeyToMof, but during the tests I ended up with a big problem, no clients were delivering any hardware inventory at all. The problem quickly spread to all clients so I started the oh-so well known journey of troubleshooting. First let’s look at the symptoms of the issue. The Resource Explorer shows no inventory data for clients Client Actions does not show the Hardware Inventory Action The PolicyEvaluator.log file contains errors A Bad MOF file is generated on the client Things that did not work I tried replacing [...]

By |2013-10-01T20:57:39+01:00oktober 1st, 2013|Configuration Manager (SCCM)|10 Comments
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Deploy Windows 8 Enterprise x86 on a UEFI x86 device using SCCM 2012 SP1

New Toys For The Boys Don’t we all love new toys, especially the ones that require an occasional recharge. The latest thing I got my hands on is the Lenovo Tablet 2, a very nice 10” tablet thing, with a couple of nice add-ons, like a docking  station, Bluetooth keyboard and a pen like stylus. But what I really like about it is that it runs a full version of Windows 8 x86, which means that I can deploy its OS over and over again   So I fired up my SCCM Console to do exactly that … The Drivers [...]

By |2013-04-03T23:07:11+01:00april 3rd, 2013|Configuration Manager (SCCM), General info, OS Deployment, Windows Client, Windows Server|14 Comments
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PowerShell – How to do WMIClass CreateInstance but WITH credentials

Today I was building a script to create system resources in SCCM 2012 and part of the task was to add these resources to a set of collections. The script will use from the SCCM server when finally implemented but for now I was using my laptop for editing and debugging. When I came to the point where I had to create the actual membership rules for the collections I ran into a hurdle that puzzled me. The WMI object I had to create was the SMS_CollectionRuleDirect, which often is done using this simple PowerShell snippet: $ruleClass = [WMICLASS]"\\$($server)\root\sms\site_$($sitecode):SMS_CollectionRuleDirect".CreateInstance() And [...]

By |2013-03-18T18:18:58+01:00marts 18th, 2013|Configuration Manager (SCCM), General info, Powershell|7 Comments
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PowerShell to the rescue – Clean up direct collection memberships

We where talking to a customer about how to avoid waiting for Active Directory group synchronization to occur and place a device in the correct collections faster than “until the next synchronization”. The main problem with this setup was caused by the fact that they used a group-in-group membership to identify collection memberships and apparently SCCM 2012 don’t include indirect changes to group membership as delta changes (I have not tested this in details yet). So we came up with the idea to just create a direct membership to place the device in the collections instantly to make sure that [...]

By |2013-03-12T12:31:15+01:00marts 12th, 2013|Configuration Manager (SCCM), Powershell|3 Comments
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Post SCCM 2012 SP1 – failure to update boot images

*** UPDATE *** This also works if you are unable to rebuild your boot images after upgrading to Windows 10 ADK (the final version) I did a customer SP1 upgrade during the weekend, the process ran successfully according to the Setup UI, but when I later tried to update the boot images I received the following error: Failed to insert OSD binaries into the WIM file Another symptom of this problem is that when you open the properties for the boot images, the pane Optional components will show no items in either of the lists. And finally you may also [...]

By |2013-01-14T22:16:07+01:00januar 14th, 2013|Configuration Manager (SCCM), OS Deployment|7 Comments
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