Pretty Good Frontend Revisited for LTI
The last few days i've been messing around with an MDT 2008 environment in which the customer wanted to have some kind of wizard page when a computer was being deployed that was not already in the database. I remembered the Pretty Good Frontend by Johan Arwidmark which was an awesome discovery back when we were still using BDD2007. My customer however didn't have ZTI but LTI deployment going on, so I had to customize Johan's Pretty Good Frontend to my customer's needs. So why not share it with the community? 
Many thanks go to Johan Arwidmark for inventing the PGF in the first place, and Michael Niehaus who helped me solve a scripting issue
Allright here goes:
Features
- Only appears if computer is not in the MDT Database already
- Allows for entering a computer name
- Allows for Selecting target OU (Selection list is from live Actice Directory data)
- Allows for role selection (Selection list is from live MDT database)
- Configured from rules in bootstrap.ini, no hardcoded values in the Frontend
- Started as a userexit (no scripts on the winpe image)
- Checkboxes to select which data to store in the database
MDT 2010 Webcast
Michael Niehaus and Tim Mintner's walkthrough/webcast of MDT 2010 Beta 2 is now available online as Michael indicates on his blog here:
You have to register to download & they have both Live Meeting & WMV formats available
Register and download here:http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/InviteOnly.aspx?EventID=3A-78-05-A7-61-B7-4B-2B-08-41-98-B1-8C-3B-92-B4&Culture=en-US
Virtualization.. as Escher would make it
Trust me, the Hyper-V installation & desingn posts are not finished yet; I will continue with that once I have regained some inspiration.
In the mean time, I got myself a shiny Macbook Pro (naah.. just the 15" version) with 4 GB memory and it's waiting for me to finally start practicing photoshop. There however lies a problem; I think I lack some expressionistic genes and after 1 month of downloading and installing all cool Mac stuff it is time to actually start utilizing the machine. Besides initiating RDP sessions to my Hyper-V servers, there must be some better use for the machine
Well.. Since Virtual PC for MAC is still not available I installed VMware Fusion (Workstation variant for MAC). I won't bother you with that install routine, it's next,next finish) and soon there was the inevitable question; what shall I run inside that? well.. let's do ESX!
So how to do that? Well there are quite some instructions available on the net (ie. here or here) so just click there to see what is the trick.
Installing ESX was a breeze now. After connecting to the console and creating a esx-VM (within a fusion-VM) I got a nifty little error: You may not power on a virtual machine in a virtual machine.
Well... that's kind of a bummer now isn't it?
Luckily there are some additional isolation settings that can be set within the vmx file as can be found here.
After some wrestling with formatting (quotes vs no quotes) the VM actually powered on and right now it's installing VMware virtual center.
Of course performance is not really stunning but that's logical. After all, you have to be kind of a weirdo to want this I suppose. Apart from that; for about 800 euro's a fine 8 GB physical host can be purchased but yeah.. my attick is already at full power capacity .
So, is there any use of this evenings work? Practically; not really. However the plan is to connect to virtual center server to SCVMM. Aha! now that's a use