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Microsoft supports running SCCM 2007 SP2 on a 2008 R2 server, but I’m doubting whether or not running SCCM 2007 SP2 in Native mode in an environment using a 2008 R2 CA is supported (and if so, there’s an issue to be aware of).  Specifically, it seems like client certificates created with a 2008 R2 CA (following the instructions on Technet for a 2008 CA) do not work by default in SCCM 2007 when running a site in Native mode (you’ll get MP errors stating that it cannot connect via HTTP, and mpcontrol.log will contain errors that the SAN2 fields have errors).  It seems if you create your 2008 R2 CA with the default Key store provider, the client certificates just do not work.  However, if you create your 2008 R2 CA with the Microsoft Strong cryptography provider (which is the default for 2003 and 2008 CAs), magically the certs created work fine.  If you look at the contents of the certs created between a 2008 and 2008 R2 CA, they “look” identical, but something else must be happening I haven’t dug into yet.

I finally got around to downloading Storage Server 2008 for some hyper-v / iscsi tests I am working on, and after installing Storage Server it did not ask for me to create a password like other Server 2008 / Server 2008 R2 server installs do on first boot.  It appears the default password is “wSS2008!” (minus the quotes, of course).  I found it from a bing search, here.  I figured maybe someone else will run across it and read this, and not have to resort to using DaRT to reset the password offline as I did.

Obviously, if you’re using SS 2008, you’ll want to change this password anyway – not sure why this was done this way, but it was.

OK, ran across this today, and there are a few ways to fix it.  The most time-consuming way (but seems to me to be the least invasive) is to remove 976569 and 976570, install 974417 (reboot), and then re-install 976569 and 976570.  I do not know what it is about those two updates that seems to cause the failure, but since I’m building images I don’t really care either – the workaround “fixes” it well enough for me.

EDIT 9th January 2010 – the script has gone a fairly major revision due to changes in the Office 2010 product key storage location, as well as migrating this to a class-based script for speed.

Again, another side project – a computer info VBScript. I’ve modified it a bit to output information to screen (execute with cscript from a cmd prompt), but this could be modified to do a lot more. This is just a simple script template, and as usual I’m posting here for consumption in the event anyone finds this useful:

Had to work on one of these for a client, and decided that while there’s a whole host of documentation out there, there aren’t a lot of good working examples of how to use the proxy auto config functions properly in a complex file.

Since I spent the better part of 8 hours getting something that works properly in the environment (including site blocking to a custom server), I figured I’d share it with the users of this series of tubes in the hope it helps someone.

This has been posted about the web many times, but I wanted to post it here for folks who read this blog as well.  I love space imagery, so using the NASA picture of the day as a theme/wallpaper seemed interesting, and I know it had been done but had never really figured out how to do it (I didn’t really try hard, either, but that’s neither here nor there).  I managed to make a .theme file that works with the NASA Large Image Of The Day RSS feed, so I’ll post the contents here in the off chance anyone wants to use it.  Obviously it can be modified to use any RSS feed containing images, I’d suppose, by changing the DisplayName (for cosmetic reasons) and the RssFeed parameter (for obvious functional reasons).  I used the post on this from the Engineering Win7 blog as a guideline, so read that if you want more info.
Here’s the file, in it’s entirety:

OK, so I haven’t had a chance to finish up either of the two posts I’ve been working on, so to start I’m merging them into one larger MDT post.  Secondly, however, I’ve also been working with a friend of mine on creating a logon script for his environment that will replace a certain other tool they are using for logon management for their mix of 9x and 2000 workstations.  They’re slowly upgrading their back-end environment in preparation for a migration to Windows 7 on the clients, and they wanted to see if they could move from <product> to logon scripts and group policy (they are going to be using MDT and SCCM for deployment and lifecycle management).  They had to try and completely replace their current solution with group policy and a logon script (or scripts), and this has been accomplished.

Just a quick note to point out that the final release of MDT 2010 has released to web (RTW) and is available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3bd8561f-77ac-4400-a0c1-fe871c461a89

One of the more interesting things in MDT is the “Application bundle” application install option.  What an application bundle allows is the ability to install multiple applications, in order, as dependencies.  Think of it more as a logical container for applications that need to be installed, perhaps in a specific order, or as prerequisites for another application (like, for instance, installing Visual Studio 2008 prerequisites, Visual Studio itself, and then the latest service pack).

Adding the application(s)

To create an application bundle that will show up in the list of applications to install (or be available to configure via a task sequence), you first need to add all of the applications to MDT that will make up the bundle.  This is done similar to adding Office 2007 as I documented in my post on creating an MDT deployment point – you must create a New Application and add it’s source files to the deployment share.  I’ll document quickly how to add the Windows Live Essentials components to your deployment share and “bundle” them (instructions on getting the .msi packages you’ll need from the Windows Live Essentials downloadable package can be found here, if you do actually want to try this).

Having a USB key that will install multiple versions of Windows is great, but what if you want to add other Windows PE images to it, above and beyond the installers?  For example, what if you wanted to add a recovery environment, like the Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT), or a BartPE environment, or any other Windows PE-based environments?  Well, it’s not that hard to do, and I’ll document how to do it with the Microsoft DaRT x86 and x64 recovery ISOs that it creates in this example.

Adding the DaRT files

First, you will need to copy the files from the MS DaRT WinPE ISO image to your “Content” folder that was created when you used MDT 2010 as per my previous post.  The content folder should look something like this:

And the contents of the MS DaRT ISO image, once extracted to the hard disk, will look something like this: