Jeremy Saunders

Jeremy Saunders is the Problem Terminator; the MacGyver of IT. Views and Intellectual Property (IP) published on this site belong to Jeremy. Please refer to the About page for more information about Jeremy.

Deployment Script for the Ctrl-Alt-Del IT Consultancy Tools

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A good friend of mine, Warren Simondson from Ctrl-Alt-Del IT Consultancy, writes some awesome tools. There are a particular set I use for all Terminal/Citrix Server deployments I refer to as “User Self-Help Tools”. The below script is what I use to deploy them. Simply add the tools you wish to deploy to an array. It can create shortcuts in a Start Menu folder and/or on the Desktop simply by setting a couple of boolean values as documented in the script.

Simply place this script in the same folder with the tools. Setup the arrTools and arrToolNames arrays. Execute it using the cscript processor. And voila…all done 🙂

Enjoy!

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Using a Group Policy WMI filter to test for a registry value

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I wanted a clean and simple way to prevent group policies applying during an automated build process. This is because it can potentially cause some of the components of the build process to fail. One of the last tasks to run on all servers built using my unattended build method will stamp the registry with the build version and date, so I was pretty eager to implement a WMI filter that would read the build version to determine whether or not the policy should apply. Easier said than done! I found a great article on WMI Filters that went into the requirements and gave an example, but I found that I still needed to do a considerable amount of research in order for everything to start making sense.

Copy the below MOF file to…

%SystemRoot%\System32\wbem

Compile it by typing…

Mofcomp -class:forceupdate BuildInfo.mof

Test it by typing…

Wmic path BuildInfo WHERE (BuildVersion Like “2.%”) get BuildVersion

This will return the build number from the registry for all 2.x builds

WMI Filter will be…

select * from BuildInfo where (BuildVersion Like “2.%”)

This will return True for all version 2.x builds

Please review the MOF file below. It is fully documented, and will help anyone who wants to implement the same process.

Enjoy!

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Automate the population of the user’s MS Office Credentials

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This script will add the user’s correct Username and UserInitials to the MS Office registry key to prevent the first time prompt when a user runs up a program in the Office suite.

It has been specifically designed to populate the values for multiple versions of Office as per the arrVersions array. Please review the script below to understand how this works.

Enjoy!

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Enable Clock on Task Bar for Windows XP and 2003

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Microsoft made it a real challenge to automate the enabling of the Clock on the taskbar. Some clever people worked out how this can be achieved several years ago by manipulating certain bits of the Settings binary value under the “Stuckrects2” registry key. However, it would only take effect on the 2nd logon, because the Stuckrects2 key is only created on the first logoff for a new user profile. I’ve simply extended an earlier script, written by Jeff Durbin, to create the Stuckrects2 key structure and set the Settings value to a default value during the first logon. This then allows us to manipulate the value as intended so that we can ensure the task bar Clock is displayed for all new user logons.

Enjoy!

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A long time between posts

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Wow…the last 4 months have flown by…been so busy at work and home. My New Years resolution was to start blogging every day, but that hasn’t exactly happened! Been working on multiple customer engagements, which has been challenging and absorbed a lot of my time and focus. Have taken a lot of work off the … Read more

HTTP to HTTPS Redirection for Citrix Web Interface

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I wrote this HTTP to HTTPS redirection script for a customer so that they were able to leave TCP port 80 open through their firewall to make the transition over to using the Citrix Secure Gateway (CSG) solution a little less confusing for their users. There were a couple fo goals I wanted to achieve with this script:

  1. I needed to write a single script that could run from “C:\Inetpub\wwwroot” and “C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\XenApp”.
  2. I didn’t want to hardcode any customer specific information into the script to make it more universal.

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Citrix Secure Gateway (CSG) 3.1 Deployment Issue

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Something I found after installing Citrix Secure Gateway (CSG) 3.1 on a server running Web Interface (WI) 5.0.1. It removed permissions from the “%ProgramFiles%\Citrix\Web Interface\5.0.1\Clients” folder and instructed it to inherrit from its parent.

Therefore, only the Administrators local group had full control.

This was causing problems for client updates and downloads via the CSG server.

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