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Johan Arwidmark

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Validate Packages for ConfigMgr Task Sequences

By Johan Arwidmark / May 21, 2023

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 […]

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My Favorite CMPivot Queries

By Johan Arwidmark / May 20, 2023

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

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Find Scheduled Tasks via PowerShell

By Johan Arwidmark / April 26, 2023

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

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GitHub Dev – Using VS Code From Your Browser

By Johan Arwidmark / April 22, 2023

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 […]

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Benchmarking M.2 PCIe Adapters for Lab Workstations

By Johan Arwidmark / March 29, 2023

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 […]

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Using Modern Driver Management with MDT Lite Touch

By Johan Arwidmark / March 26, 2023

While MDT is no longer being updated, and does not officially support Windows 11, it's still a great deployment solution and you can in fact deploy any Windows Client and Windows Server OS with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 […]

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Remote Desktop Session Keeps Disconnecting – The Solution

By Johan Arwidmark / March 19, 2023

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 […]

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Creating Pre-Caching Task Sequences using PowerShell

By Johan Arwidmark / March 17, 2023

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 […]

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Optimizing VHDX Files in a Hyper-V Lab

By Johan Arwidmark / February 27, 2023

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 […]

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Understanding the MDT Lite Touch Driver Repository

By Johan Arwidmark / February 26, 2023

Earlier this week I was asked to help out with an MDT Lite Touch Driver Repository that was missing most of its drivers. After some research it turned out that the drivers.xml had been truncated, something that can happen if multiple admin are working with drivers at the same time (MDT uses a last-writer-wins approach). […]

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Total Control for Drivers and Firmware – Cloud Edition

By Johan Arwidmark / February 26, 2023

Having total control for drivers and firmware, mean that you are following a per model method when deploying or updating drivers. The total control method has been proven rock-solid for on-premises deployment solutions, and with the newly released commercial controls for driver and firmware updates in the WUfB deployment service it is time to take […]

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Use a Win32 app to Copy Files and Folders

By Johan Arwidmark / December 2, 2022

Here is a quick guide to create a Win32 app in Intune to copy som files and folders to your clients. In the example I had some tools I wanted to copy to all my lab machines and use Microsoft Intune to do so. Source Folder In this example I copied my files and folders […]

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Exploring Firmware Assessments in Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management

By Johan Arwidmark / November 30, 2022

On November 28 (yesterday), the new Firmware Assessments feature in Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management was announced as being available in Public Preview. Read more about the announcement here: Firmware assessments in Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management Licensing The license requirements are too often clear as mud, but it seems to work just fine with a regular […]

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Trigger Full WSUS Metadata Synchronization in ConfigMgr

By Johan Arwidmark / November 22, 2022

If you ever have the need to force/trigger a full sync of the WSUS Metadata in ConfigMgr, for example for troubleshooting, or simple demo purposes. This is how. Forcing WSUS Metadata sync PowerShell to the rescue 🙂 Simply run this command after importing the Configuration Manager PowerShell module: The above command really just creates an […]

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Deploying Windows 11 on Arm Devices – Jurassic Deployment Style

By Johan Arwidmark / November 4, 2022

I recently bought a machine capable of running Windows 11 on Arm, The Windows Dev Kit 2023 aka Project Volterra. Now, since neither MDT nor ConfigMgr support Windows deployment on Arm devices, in this post you find a quick and dirty solution that takes us back to the Jurassic era, before OSD was cool 🙂 To […]

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Back to Basics – Implementing an Image Factory

By Johan Arwidmark / November 1, 2022

Last week I was participating in a thread on Twitter regarding a request for Microsoft to generate monthly updated media (ISO files) for all supported Windows versions. Something that Microsoft certainly can do, and probably do internally, but for whatever reason have decided to only publish for the very latest versions of Windows. Because of […]

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MDT Lite Touch Warning – Unable to create WebService class

By Johan Arwidmark / October 31, 2022

Every now and then when using MDT Lite Touch to deploy Windows you may run into a yellow summary screen (warning screen) with the following warning message: Unable to create WebService class Background In the preceding example there were some other warnings as well, but you often find the Unable to create WebService class message […]

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Highlights from Microsoft Technical Takeoff, October 24-27, 2022

By Johan Arwidmark / October 28, 2022

Unless you have been totally off grid the last few days you probably noticed a ton of new information on Endpoint Management from Microsoft, more specifically from the Microsoft Technical Takeoff event that has been running this week. The Microsoft Technical Takeoff event was combination of about live AMA (Ask Microsoft Anything) sessions and pre-recorded […]

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