This week I had to find out the command line of a scheduled task from a few hundred machines, to make sure they had received the correct task, deployed from a Group Policy. Well, PowerShell to the rescue. Here is a small PowerShell snippet that will return the command line from a give task: Below […]
Here is a quick tip if you are deploying many applications in your task sequence: Make sure that the ConfigMgr client cache size is configured with enough space for your applications. If not, you'll see something like the following: Increasing the ConfigMgr Client Cache Back in the early days of ConfigMgr OSD you needed to […]
During OS Deployment it's not entirely uncommon to see organizations renaming the local admin directly in the task sequence. There are many options available for doing so, but using a healthy dose of PowerShell is an effective way. 🙂 Using the Rename-LocalUser Cmdlet Below sample gets hold of the local administrator account from its well-known […]
In my labs I frequently use bandwidth control to simulate different customer environments, allowing me to mimic distributed environments spanning over multiple locations. While Hyper-V itself does support bandwidth limiting, it can only do that on outgoing (outbound) traffic which is not really a real-world scenario where you have routers and WAN links limiting the […]
You would think that a product named Windows 11 Enterprise would be optimized for business use out of the box, but like the Windows 10 Enterprise, Windows 11 Enterprise is far from it. In this post you learn about common configuration changes enterprises are doing to make Windows 11 more suitable for enterprises. The Supported […]
When using ConfigMgr for Software Updates, via the Software Update Point role, you need to select which classifications and products you want to support in your environment. This configuration would have been super-easy if: Unfortunately, none of the above conditions are true, so in this post you find some clarification on some of the stranger […]
When working with content copied from an ISO file, like the Hydration Kit ISO, you'll find that the files are being marked as read only after being copied from the ISO to a folder. Like the CustomSettings_DC01.ini shown in the below example. The Script To remove the Readonly attribute on all the files, you can […]
Not signing your Win32 App detection scripts may sound as a very strange suggestion, and it's certainly not ideal from a security standpoint, but depending on how many applications you have that are using scripts for detection and/or requirement rules you may run into unexpected results… Microsoft Intune Policy Limitations When using Microsoft Intune for […]
In a recent project I was deploying hundreds of VMs across a large set of Hyper-V Hosts, and I needed to capture the screen output of each VM for documentation and troubleshooting purposes. Long story short, here is a PowerShell script that will capture still images from the screen of each Hyper-V VM according to […]
In a recent project I was collecting client health data across machines in multiple regions, all with different cultures/languages configured. As part of the collection, I was adding in a date column in my report via PowerShell. I was using the Get-Date command to get the current date, and then applying the native format options […]
A quite common issue when doing OS Deployment with ConfigMgr is that there is a mismatch on the packages on one or more DPs. The result on the client is an error message in the smsts.log saying: The hash value is not correct, and the error code is 0x80091007. The fix is typically to update the […]
There are plenty of CMPivot examples out there, but here are a few of my favorites that I use pretty much every week. Enjoy 🙂 Lookup installed application by product name Lookup installed application count by product name Get Free Disk Space in GB
This morning I needed to find which scheduled task that ran a specific PowerShell script, and also which username that was configured to run the task. While the Get-ScheduledTask and Get-ScheduledTaskInfo cmdlets does retrieve detailed information about schedule tasks, they don't reveal the information about the username. Good old schtasks.exe to the rescue. The Script
It's funny how some news simply flies under the radar, in this case I completely missed the release of github.dev back in August, 2021. Github.dev is web-based editor – essentially a lightweight VS Code – allowing you to edit code directly in your browser. There are two ways to go access the VS Code environment […]
Here is a short PowerShell script to list all packages that a ConfigMgr Task Sequence is using, and export to a text file.
Just about a week ago I bought a used HP Z8 G4 Workstation on eBay to be used as a ConfigMgr / Intune lab machine. The machine I found only included a SATA SSD and of course I wanted more performance than that can bring, so I ordered a #shiny 4 TB NVMe SSD from […]
While MDT is no longer being updated, and does not officially support Windows 11, it's still a great deployment solution and you can in fact deploy any Windows Client and Windows Server OS with it, including Windows 11. The recommend method to inject drivers during deployment using MDT is called Total Control, which means you […]
In my lab I have quite a few machines I remote into on a daily basis, but one of them, connected to the same network switch, would at times disconnect me several times per hour. Sometimes the session reconnected itself, sometimes I had to close the initial connection, and connect again. Researching the problem After […]
Here is a PowerShell script that will create a pre-caching task sequence for ConfigMgr. In this example I'm enumerating all driver packages, and creating a pre-caching task sequence with those packages. If you want to learn more about the core concept of pre-caching for P2P in ConfigMgr, check this post: Pre-Caching Content for P2P in […]
In my Lab(s), I have hundreds of VMs spread across multiple Hyper-V hosts (and a few VMware hosts too, but that's out of scope for this post). The operating systems used for my Hyper-V hosts are a mix of Windows Server 2016, 2019, and 2022. Also, I have Data DeDuplication enabled on all volumes used […]