Michaja van der Zouwen

RES One Automation PowerShell Module

/in , /by

Note: This blogpost is also posted on my personal blog: itmicah.wordpress.com.

resam-posh

When you’re a system administrator and a PowerShell enthusiast a single solution to a problem can result in something big and elaborate. A while ago I was implementing a MDT environment for a customer. I wanted to fill the MDT database with all existing client computers. For that I needed all the clients names and their MAC addresses. Client names weren’t the issue but MAC addresses were a little bit more challenging. I decided to turn to RES One Automation (RES AM) for help. I knew RES AM has the ability to identify agents by their MAC address so it has to store all agent MAC addresses in the datastore. After figuring out how to pry this information from the database I started to wonder what else I could find in there. This resulted in a complete PowerShell module (my first!) for RES One Automation!  Read more →

Michaja van der Zouwen

Configure WER User-Mode (Application) crash dumps PowerShell-style

/in , /by

Note: This blogpost is also posted on my personal blog: itmicah.wordpress.com.

When you’re a system administrator you’re likely to encounter a few application crashes during your career. In order to troubleshoot these crashes Windows Error Reporting (WER) comes in handy. It can be configured so that full user-mode dumps are collected and stored locally after a user-mode application crashes. You can than send the dumps to the software supplier or analyse it yourself using your tool of choice. Read more →

Michaja van der Zouwen

Copy AD group memberships from a source user to other users

/in , /by

Note: This blogpost is also posted on my personal blog: itmicah.wordpress.com

One of those mondaine tasks you get to do as an IT administrator is assigning users to security groups for access to resources in the domain. Usually, when you ask the person making this request which security groups the user account needs membership for, they’ll tell you to use some other user account as a reference. Sometime you’ll even get a list of users that need to have the same memberships. Read more →

Michaja van der Zouwen

Change network connection category using PowerShell

/in , /by

Note: This blogpost is also posted on my personal blog: itmicah.wordpress.com

 

refwin-advfirewall-img4

I recently came across an issue with PSRemoting to a Windows 7 XenDesktop VM. I discovered remoting was disabled on the remote system because one of the network connections was a Public connection (it was the PVS connection). To change this using PowerShell is quite easy in Windows 8 or higher: the Set-NetConnectionProfile command is available to do just that. However, in Windows 7 this is not so easy. Even though PowerShell 4 was installed, the command was absent. So I decided to create my own functions to facilitate this, based on this script by Microsoft: LINK. This script utilizes the Network List Manager to make the change.  Read more →

Michaja van der Zouwen

Create a custom Deployment Wizard pane for Updates (MDT)

/in , /by

Note: This blogpost is also posted on my personal blog: itmicah.wordpress.com

One of the great things about the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) is that it’s a very open product. All the scripts are customizable, including the Deployment Wizard. We can add new functionality to the deployment procedure and add wizard pages so we can choose to use those new functions (or not) with each new deployment. Microsoft encourages creativity for this particular product. One of the functions I wanted to create a wizard page for was the deployment of updates. I wanted to be able to choose between a quick OS deployment for test purposes (no updates) and a slower, more production worthy deployment (with updates). And since I take my deployment VM on the road with me, I wanted the ability to choose if the updates are downloaded from Microsoft Update or a clients’ WSUS server. The result looks like this:

Result Update Pane

Here’s how it’s done: Read more →

Michaja van der Zouwen

Add WSUS Target Group option to MDT deployments

/in , /by

Note: This blogpost is also posted on my personal blog: itmicah.wordpress.com

One of the great features you get when deploying a Windows operating system using my favorite deployment tool, the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), is the ability to update the OS using either Windows Update or a local WSUS server. The latter is obviously preferred because it’s a lot quicker and you have better control over what updates you want to install. WSUS has a feature called Target groups, which you can utilize for managing update approvals for a group of computers. This way you’ll be able to approve or decline specific updates for  Remote Desktop Session hosts or Exchange servers etc. While MDT let’s you specify a WSUS server to get updates from there’s no way to specify the target group you want to receive updates from. Let’s fix that, shall we? Read more →

Michaja van der Zouwen

Screensaver not working in a XenDesktop VDI environment

/in , /by

Note: This blogpost is also posted on my personal blog: itmicah.wordpress.com

I was troubleshooting some RES Workspace Manager (RES WM) issues in a customer’s XenDesktop 7.x (Citrix) environment when I came across the following issue: The screensaver didn’t start automatically, even though I had forced a screensaver through RES WM. After some research I’d come to the conclusion that this was a known issue in XenDesktop 7.x. Apparently Citrix has decided to disable Screensavers and power-save options in XenDesktop. They provide the following solution in their eDocs documentation: Read more →