Sccm 2007 – Top Tips’n tricks

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During one of those late nights browsing the net I stumbled across what turned out to be a time-saver in the high-roller end, what is the real interesting thing is that it is a was a total coincidence I got to think of an alternative use for a small utility aimed at a complete different audience.

If you are using MS-SCCM 2007 you know the hassle of hardware certification of new and old pc-models. If you wish to keep a tight leach on which drivers you install to the PC’s you deploy using MS-SCCM, you have to figure out which drivers are actually needed and obtain unpacked versions.  Now even if this may sound like a very simple task, experience quickly makes you think twice, take a modern Laptop PC and try to see how many odd hardware devices it contains.

The process has so far been to install the PC using your installation CD, then download the drivers from the manufacture and install them and figure out which driver was related to which unknown hardware device.  Then you would need to unpack the strange driver packages and figure out which files was actually required and import them to SCCM.  Often you would end up with installation packages which could not easily be unpacked (if at all), and you would have to do a lot of manual labour and testing to obtain the drivers. 

Well think again…  and let me cut your hardware certification time to a fraction…  Now you take your new laptop out of the box, start it up and let it install the preloaded OS.  Then install “Driver Magician” and use the build in backup function to extract the drivers, finally import the extracted driver-directory to SCCM and you are done, the pc model can now be deployed using SCCM.

“Driver Magician” was not actually made with this in mind, it is actually what I would describe as a geek tool.  It is intended for those who often install their computers and wish to minimize the time it takes to install the drivers, but believe me as a side effect it does a VERY good job of hardware certification for use with MS-SCCM.

This mean you can likely save at least 4-6 hours per pc model you need to hardware certify.

Piece of pie..

Watch a geeked YouTube intro, mind you this is not aimed at SCCM usage but more the original intend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uq6U0y25mE

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Delete locked files

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unlocker1Have you ever met the annoying dialog box stating that the file you are trying to delete can’t be deleted – stating that it is in use (even though you KNOW this NOT to be true?)..  Sure you have, especially running Vista (strangely enough I seem to see this issue more often on my Vista box than on Win2003/xp) ..  

Well anyhow, there are ways to deal with that (not guaranteed, but quite often it works)..

http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/

is a small freeware utility that will assist in resolving this, it can quite often delete a file that states its locked.

UPDATE Nov 2009;
Also check https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=1045 for an alternate utility in a 64bit version (Lockhunter)

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Mstsc command – Microsoft set on annoying me..

Some stupid ¤#?# at Microsoft has seen fit to change the parameter to Mstsc (Remote Desktop) in SP1 (Vista/Win 2008) and SP3 (XP). Before you typed “Mstsc /Console” to connect to the console session at a server (basically some not so well written applications only worked here), but that was then – now say hello to “Mstsc /Admin”…

Even more genius, the /Console is SILENTLY IGNORED…  just so it will take you longer to figure out what is wrong, AND of cause all third party Terminal Services applications will no longer be able to connect to console. Yes I know, of cause new versions will be released…  but what #¤”% would have been wrong with leaving the /Console for backwards compatibility.

And why, well because Windows 2008 no longer needs this (yeah we heard this one before ;-)), ok cool – but hey Windows 2003 still does and will be around for QUITE some time still (we still have one or two NT4 servers running)..

Sorry no price for that one guys.

Details click here

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TrueCrypt 5 – now with support for system drive encryption

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You may have heard about the excellent utility TrueCrypt which create encrypted virtual drives or partitions!?  But now it has been released in a version 5.0a which should support the underlying OS (that is transparent bootup encryption of the system drive).  Excellent..  I have not had time to check it, but if it works its utterly excellent (and best of all FREEEEEEEEEE!).

Recovery is as I read it achieved via an ISO boot image created upon installation, but again I have not checked this.

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Remotely enable Remote Desktop (TS)

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Need to administer a remotely located server that has not enabled remote desktop!?  Sure you can make a GP or do some registry editing, but hey it all takes time, some nice guy has made a util that will deal with this for you, just point and click..

http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/06/remotely-enable-remote-desktop.html

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VMware acquire Thinstall

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Nice, Microsoft is about to get some healthy competition to their Softgrid software virtualization.  VMware just bought Thinstall, for those of you who have no experience with Softgrid / Thininstall the brief description of what is is all about would be something like this;  Software virtualization is more or less the same as VMware Server / Microsoft Virtual Server is to OS virtualization, it allow you to run an application without installing it and without polluting the host os with registry entries and config files stored all over, an other cool thing is it will allow you to eg. install Office 2000, 2003 and 2007 all at the same time.. 

Goto http://www.vmware.com/whatsnew/thinstall.html to watch a demo or try http://www.thinstall.com/.  Thinstall has the upper hand over Microsoft as Thininstall does not require client software to be installed in order to use a virtual application, Thinstall also include the option to create .msi files (just as softgrid).

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Visual tour; http://www.thinstall.com/demos/intro_dec11/
Very cool, and pice of pie… thrust me….

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Unpack .EXE files (uniextract)

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If you ever worked with deployment, you know the issue where you need an .MSI file or other driver files but all the vendor is supplying is a SETUP.EXE file.

Well many .EXE files can via some obscure parameters /Extract /B or whatever be extracted, but as all vendors use different utilities to create their .EXE files it can be hard to figure out how to expand them, plus some .EXE files actually can not be extracted (or is not designed to)..  Usually WinRAR is a good bet, it can actually extract many .EXE filetypes..  but not all 🙁

Fear no more, Uniextract to the rescue…  maybe it wont extract ALL but atleast it extracted many of the files I had problems with, so big thumbs up from me..  It is quite easy to use, once installed just right click on the .EXE file and select extract to subdirectory..  Easy as pie 😀

http://legroom.net/software/uniextract

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LZArc – Poor mans WinRAR replacement

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For those who can not afford a copy of WinRAR (www.rarlabs.com) to open .rar files a compatible freeware program is available called LZArc (not to be confused with LHarc from the good old Amiga age).

It will not win any awards for its simple but useful layout, but hey you cant get everything for nothing.

Download it from here
http://www.izarc.org/

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TeraCopy – Filecopy the safe way

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Finally someone got around to writing a useful program to assist in file-copying 🙂

We all know the feeling, we start a ‘drag-and-drop’ file-copy and somewhere along the line an error occur, bad luck if you are using Windows XP (Vista is just a tad better, but still not perfect) you can start from scratch again because you have no way of determining what actually was copied before it failed..

Well this program claims to take care of this along with numerous other nice features (like pause copy job etc).  I have so far only done a quick test, but it seem promising.

Freeware for personal use and a pro version is availabe for corporate use with additional features.

The program adds itself as right click options.
http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

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Sharepoint issue

I just had a Sharepoint 2007 issue, if you use Sharepoint to store your documents and  then change your file view to “Explorer view” you will get a warning each time you try to open/edit a file stating that it may be unsafe.

I seem to have drilled the problem down and found a solution;

1. This step may not be necessary but still it removed the “mixed zone” warning. You need to add “about:blank” as an “intranet trusted site” (add via: internet options – security – local intranet – sites – advanced).

2. You need to allow for “Launching program and files in IFrame.” found under (internet options – security – local intranet – custom level).

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