Month: May 2011

MDT

Troubleshooting MDT software installs.

By on Saturday, May 28, 2011

Took me a while to realise that you don’t need to go through the whole reinstall an OS task sequence if you just want to retest a software install that failed within an MDT installation.

Make sure that a new Task Sequence is created on the MDT server that installs an application. Then once the OS has been installed you can just connect to the mdt server deployment share and run litetouch.vbs.  Provide the credentials and test the installs.

Unfortunately I can’t work out why most of my installs are failing with unexpected error 2.

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Scripting

Commenting out command in batch file gotcha.

By on Friday, May 27, 2011

I’ve been working on a batch file script (yes I know I am meant to be using powershell) and kept getting a “The syntax of the command is incorrect”.

My code is as follows:-

reg query “hklm\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\windowsupdate\auto update\Rebootrequired”
if not errorlevel 1 (
::theKey exists therefore we need to do a reboot
echo reboot is required from previous windows updates.
)

The :: is a quick and tidy shortcut to rem out a statement in a batch file.

However – today I found out that you cannot use this trick within an if statement. Instead the :: needs to become rem

So the script becomes

if errorlevel 1 (
rem theKey exists therefore we need to do a reboot
echo reboot is required from previous windows updates.
)

For what it’s worth this is a snippet of code from a script that detects if windows updates are required, installs them, emails the log file and then reboots if required. The step above comes from a recent discovery that the patch detection returns no patches needed if the server is still in a pending reboot after patches were applied (typically because the shutdown failed to take place)

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Powershell

Scripting Guys blog formatting – now in html format.

By on Monday, May 2, 2011

You can thank me later 😉

On my way home from work late the other night I was listening to episode 152 of the Mind Of Root Podcast where Keith and Steve interviewed Ed Wilson from the Hey Scripting Guy! blog. It was a really interesting podcast and explained their goals to get users learning Powershell and push out some best practice ideas.  So far I like the power of Powershell but I’m finding the learning curve pretty steep. Especially as I can do a lot of my scripting requirements within a normal dos batch file in a lot fewer lines than Powershell requires. However I do understand that Powershell provides a lot more functionality, especially when built into products such as BPOS, exchange etc.

The next weekend I found Ed’s scripting blog, read a few articles, commented on one about using streams.exe to unblock zip files (been there, done that – very frustrating to find out you should unblock a zip file before extracting many thousands of files) and then subscribed to the blog feed.

Unfortunately the blog posts lost all their formatting when reading the rss feed so something that looks nice and clear on the webpage

Hey Scripting Guy! blog showing formatting of blog postlooked horrendous when viewed in Google reader – there are no line breaks, text formatting or anything else that makes the blog post easy to read.

Hey Scripting Guy blog post in Google Reader.I’m not quite sure why the post is a garish pink colour either, but I could live with that.

A quick look through other blogs hosted on blogs.technet.com show that formatting can be preserved (see Matt Hesters Blog feed) below so I sent an email to Ed Wilson to see if the settings could be changed.

imageHe responded back the next day and said he would pass the request onto the webmaster.  Since then I’ve been checking the rss feed and the website and today everything is displaying correctly (it looks like the switch started yesterday).  So thanks to Ed and the Technet website admins – the change is really appreciated. Hopefully this makes the reading of the blog easier for everyone else too!

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