XenApp Maintenance
Today I spotted Martin Zugec posted an article about S4matic, which I am currently working on together with Martin. To take a look at how S4Matic can help you with your XenApp maintenance look at this brilliant article by Martin Zugec!
Installing WAIK unattended
Today I was thinking of creating a sort of “master” script for MDT implementation, that would install and configure MDT2010 unattendedly. So ofcourse, my first order of business was installing all the prerequisites unattendedly… and that’s where the trouble started…. Microsoft does not support installing the WAIK via the well known /qb-! or /qn switches… because of the EULA you have to accept. I found this great article by Richard Smith on the deployment guys blog. Unfortunately for me… my script will be running under a system account (SCCM)… which means no UI at all… so the Auto-IT method didn’t quite do it for me…
So I decided to go old school, whip out my favourite MSI editing tool: Orca and create a transform that removes the Full UI requirement.
Now all you have to do is: msiexec /i waikx86.msi TRANSFORMS=waik.mst /qn and voila… fully unattended WAIK installation…
Disclaimer: This is very much NOT supported by Microsoft… so use at your own risk.
Small workaround when Clear PXE advertisements doesn’t seem to work
I find it very annoying that sometimes when I clear an PXE Advertisement from the SCCM console and I reboot the machine I still get the PXE Boot Aborted message… a small workaround I always use is the following.
- Clear the PXE Advertisement using SCCM console
- Stop the WDS Service on the SCCM PXE Server
- Clear RemoteInstall$\SMSTemp on the SCCM PXE Server
- Start WDS Service on the SCCM PXE Server
And voila! The advertisement does work this time around…
All in all I have experienced a lot of troubles with PXE and SCCM… I am really hoping the next version of SCCM will bring major improvements to this part….
Creating a custom boot image for SCCM SP2 (WinPE 3.0)
Today I had to recreate my x86 boot image in my SCCM environment. I had just upgraded my testserver to SCCM SP2 and found that the old way of creating a boot image didn’t work anymore… seeing as SCCM SP2 uses DISM.exe instead of imagex and peimg. So I went looking for instructions on creating a custom SCCM SP2 image, but couldn’t found any, so here are the instructions 
.
1. Start the Deployment Tools Command prompt and enter the following command:
COPYPE.CMD x86 1 c:\WINPE
When you're working on a 64-bit WinPE image use "amd64" instead of "x86"
2. Mount the winpe.wim file to the mount dir that’s created automatically:
DISM /Mount-Wim /WIMFile:c:\winpe\winpe.wim /Index:1 /MountDir:C:\winpe\mount
3. Add the packages required by SCCM to the wim (again, if you’re working on 64-bit Windows PE substitute "x86" with "amd64")
DISM /Image:c:\winpe\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:”C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\WinPE_FPs\winpe-scripting.cab”
DISM /Image:c:\winpe\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:”C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\WinPE_FPs\winpe-wmi.cab”
After this step you can continue adding packages (such as winpe-hta.cab and winpe-mdac.cab) or custom files to the boot image. The 2 packages worked out above (Scripting and WMI) are required by SCCM, without these packages you will receive an error during updating your boot image to the distribution points.
4. Commit the changes to the WIM and unmount the WIM
DISM /Unmount-Wim /Mountdir:c:\winpe\mount /commit (thank you for the correction Matt!, It appears as if I was quite sleepy when I wrote this post
)
5. Import your custom boot image into SCCM.
That’s it, just as simple as it was with the previous version of WAIK, only different commands