In MDT 2010 you can enable two settings that during deployment of your machines will patch them automatically using a WSUS server of your choice.
Take a look at your existing task sequence(s) and look for “Windows Update (Pre-Application Installation)” and “Windows Update (Post-Application Installation)” and choose to enable them both or just the latter.
In your customsettings.ini somewhere beneath the [Default] section add the row:
WSUSServer=http://WSUSServerName
I got a question the other day on a problem where a person is installing a set of applications during deployment of Windows 7, using MDT 2010. The problem is that one application requires to be run in Vista compatibility mode before it can even be installed, most likely due to a check in the installer for which Windows version is being used, a rather common compatibility issue.
One solution to this is to use Compatibility Administrator which is a part of ACT to create a so called “shim” which makes the installation go through, fooling the application that the OS is Windows Vista even though it is Windows 7. But, how do we get the shim applied during our deployment, which we want to automatic?
It is rather simple, just add a “run custom command” in the task sequence before the application is installed, which applies the compatibility shim to the machine, making the installation run through. Also note that you can run custom commands in the “applications” section in MDT2010, just add the command line to the path field and off you go!
Long time no see! I have lots of things to blog about, I just haven’t had the time to do so lately. Last week though I learnt about a tricky NetBIOS computer naming bug when deploying Vista using Windows Deployment Services (WDS). As you might know the NetBIOS computer names cannot be longer than 15 characters and when you in Windows Vista (and all previously released Windows versions as well) change the computer name to a name with more than 15 characters you will get a warning message
that will look something like the screenshot attached to this post.
When using Windows Deployment Services with the new option “Name and approve” the client before pushing out the image to the client, you can as you might have figured name the computer object in Active Directory and then fully automate the installation process. In the unattended answer file in the computer name section for deploying Vista we have entered %MACHINENAME% to make sure that the computer name is not randomly generated with a name like LH-XY45YHGKL and to make sure
that we will not get any questions to answer when deploying automatically.
We have a computer naming standard which obviously sometimes makes the computer name more than 15 characters. The bug is when you name a computer longer than 15 characters during Name and approve in the WDS. Then the unattended installation will fail at the specialize pass, without any particular error message, probably because it wants to show the same error message dialogue as when we are in the GUI version of Vista.