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Ami Casto

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Customizing the ViaMonstra Hydration Kit

By Ami Casto / February 16, 2017

Back in December, the ViaMonstra hydration kit was updated to support Server (and SQL) 2016.  You can follow the post here to set it up.  We get a lot of questions offline about customizing the kit, so here is a summary of customization.

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Extend the ConfigMgr Task Sequence Error Dialogue Timeout

By Ami Casto / February 12, 2017

Default behavior for failed deployments in ConfigMgr is for the error box to stick around for 15 minutes before rebooting.  That’s plenty of time if you have nothing better to do than watch progress bars and wait for failures.  But what if you have work to do and you need the error to stick around a bit longer?

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2017 The Battle Begins: Managing Modern Labs

By Ami Casto / January 2, 2017

…just kidding. I see the question posted a lot in the community forums – what OS to use for a lab environment.  The main theme to the question is always the same thing – the technician wants to be able to use data deduplication. Deduplication, if you're not familiar with it, maximizes your storage space […]

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Using ModelAlias for ConfigMgr Driver Management

By Ami Casto / December 19, 2016

As you probably know, the various driver vendors do not exactly follow the same standard for labeling their models. This is where the concept of ModelAlias comes in. It just a script that normalizes vendor model names to their real model names. In this post, you learn to use ModelAlias for driver management in ConfigMgr.

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Setting Up New Networking Features in Server 2016

By Ami Casto / October 17, 2016

I’ve been playing around with Server 2016 and the ViaMonstra Hydration Kit for ConfigMgr.  If you want your lab environment to be able to connect to the internet, you know (if you’ve been reading our books) that you need to setup a virtual router.  In Kent’s book (System Center 2012 R2: Mastering the Fundamentals), we actually walk you through setting up a very complex environment that requires you to use our “GW01” or a Vyatta virtual router in order for your lab to get out to the internet.

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