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We all remember the last tool created by Peter Nap: App-V on a stick, but Peter didn’t stop there. Yesterday Login Consultants released a new tool: The App-V Self Support Tool. One of the things that you will find out early on when actual users start working with App-V, is that sometimes they manually need to reset, preload and refresh their virtualized applications. As a result, you will need to give users access to the App-V client MMC plug-in.

The problem is, the MMC is typically off-limits for normal users in the enterprise because of security policies on desktops and laptops. And even when users have access, try explaining non-technical users how to work with the App-V client MMC plug-in. The App-V client configuration is simply way too clunky for normal users.

The great thing about the App-V Self Support tool is that is consists of just 2 files that do not have to be installed, one executable and one XML file for the configuration. This makes enterprise deployment quite easy: just drop the files anywhere on the client and provide the users a shortcut to start the application.

The interface is deliberately simplified, so users can find their way around. There are only a few options: View, Language, Repair, Cache, Start and Refresh. Users do not need anything more, and more importantly, they are not required to ask the helpdesk to support them.

Download the App-V Self Support (App-V SST) tool here.

[Virtualizing the App-V Support tool is not recommended! (No really.. it breaks)]

If you use scripts for all kind of automation purposes, you definately have stumbled upon the issue that when you run the script, which in turn calls an executable file from somewhere on a network share, you get prompted with a Open File Dialog. Very annoying when you just want your script to run silently.

Fortunately there’s a workaround for this:

Change the SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS environment variable

Within your script, temporarily change the SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS environment variable to 1.
Note Do not use this as a permanent system environment variable because it will disable all Zone Checking.

VBScript example:

set oShell= CreateObject('Wscript.Shell')
set oEnv = oShell.Environment('PROCESS')

oEnv('SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS') = 1

oShell.Run 'somecommand',0,True

oEnv.Remove('SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS')

Note: I replaced all double quotes with single quotes in this example because of the syntax highlighting, if you want to use this example, find and replace all single quotes ( ‘ ) with double quotes ( ” )

Powershell example:

$env:SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS = 1

somecommand.exe

Remove-Item env:\SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS

When you are working with deployments, whether it is SCCM, MDT, Altiris, LanDesk or whatever tool you are using, or you’re building a script which uses WMI queries, there’s always some actions you only want to perform on certain computers. In SCCM and MDT there’s builtin support for WMI queries. For instance, you want to apply a mass storage driver only to a computer that has that controller present.

To build these WMI Queries, in the past I always used the WMIC commandline tool. A very handy tool, but the syntax for this tool is a bit different then your average:

SELECT * FROM Win32_ComputerSystem WHERE model LIKE ‘%DC7900%’

In WMIC this query would be translated to:

WMIC PATH Win32_ComputerSystem WHERE “model LIKE ‘%DC7900%’

For this particular query it’s not that different, but what if you only want to get certain values?

SELECT Model FROM Win32_ComputerSystem WHERE model LIKE ‘%DC7900%’

Would be translated to:

WMIC PATH WIN32_ComputerSystem WHERE “model LIKE ‘%DC7900%’ GET model

As you see, it’s not really hard translating the commands, but there’s an even easier way to get your WMI Queries

Use the builtin Windows Management Instrumentation Tester: wbemtest.exe
Start>Run>wbemtest.exe

Click on connect and type the namespace you want to connect to: (Default for WMI is root\cimv2)

Now we have all sorts of buttons available… we can easily open and explore a class and see it’s methods and properties… we can create a query in the syntax of:

SELECT * FROM Win32_ComputerSystem

Happy exploring and testing with WMI

As part of Microsofts Windows Management Framework, Powershell 2.0 is now available for the various Windows OSes. Download it from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=151321

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!

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.

Download

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….

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

Check out this great article by Jeroen van de Kamp:

 http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/jeroenvandekamp/archive/2009/10/28/the-fundamental-flaws-of-thin-clients.aspx

In his article Jeroen points out why organizations should steer away from “thin-clients” and steer towards ‘thin-PC’s”.

Yes its true, you can get VSI 2.0 Pro for free, Login Consultants just announced that all Bloggers/Media can get a free NFR license to play around with. Just send an email to vsi@loginconsultants.com with as much’s details as possible.