In the past when using SMS or SCCM and I’ve needed to notify the user that a software installation is going to take place, I would write a VBScript utilizing wshShell.Popup and WScript.Sleep. Today I came across a good piece of free software that provides a bit of a nicer interface to display these messages. [...]

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I’ve previously blogged about using TightVNC in WinPE. This time I have successfully intergrated DameWare Remote Control 7.5 into WinPE 3.1. In my case I was using an x86 version of Windows PE 3.1. I am using UNATTEND.XML to install the DameWare process. We cannot use tsconfig.ini because it is called too late in the [...]

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This is an old trick, one that I have been using for many years, but I’ve never documented it. Often when working with SCCM, you will need to test how something will operate when running in the SYSTEM context (as opposed USER context) – scripts, exes, msis, lots of things. I’ve used the trick with [...]

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I came across this very useful free tool for alerting when a certificate that has been issued by an internal Microsoft Certificate Authority is going to expire (SCOM can do this too but this is a good alernative). In the words of the developer: The Certificate Expiration Alerter helps IT departments monitor the expiration status [...]

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When trying to create SCCM task sequence media, I was getting the following error message: Error creating media. Error message is : A required privilege is not held by the client.. Please refer to CreateTsMedia.log to get details. I needed to ensure that I had the ‘Manage auditing and security log’ right under ‘Computer Configuration\Windows [...]

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I had a requirement to be able set a custom SCCM Task Sequence variable to the value (IP address) of the DHCP server that had issued the IP address to the client . This meant that later in the Task Sequence I could re-use this value for other things, in this case it was to [...]

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