vbscript

Custom MDT Wizard For Network Settings

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Setting a fixed IP Address during the MDT task sequences has always been ugly. It’s an area that I believe needs to be revisited by Microsoft.

  • I don’t like the concept behind the “Apply Network Settings” task action. I don’t find it dynamic enough. In my opinion it’s too cumbersome and involved.
  • The old “NICSettings_Definition_ENU.xml” custom pane no longer works from MDT 2012 and above as pointed out by a commenter on Michael Niehaus article about Customizing Wizards with MDT 2012.
  • I don’t like the way the ZTINicUtility.vbs and ZTINICConfig.wsf scripts have been constructed. Too messy and too hard to follow. I appreciate that these have ended up the way they are over time, but a fresh start would be my recommendation.

I just found that everything out of the box was too messy and static. There are a couple of different blogs by others on this, but they also seemed quite awkward.

Of course if you’re looking to automate as much as possible, which is what I strive for, then some back-end apps require a fixed/static IP address set before they’re installed. Sure you can reserve addresses in DHCP, but that’s a management touch point I wanted to avoid. I prefer to allocate in the design and build out based on that.

I wanted something slick and simple so I created my own.

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The Challenges of Using VBScript to Create Shortcuts

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Updated 8th December 2008…

Today I was finalising the application deployment for a new XenApp farm. One of the final scripts to create was to place 9 shortcuts on the Desktop of the All Users profile. That’s quite a simple task, and for the most part some would probably just end up copying a bunch of previously created ones into place. But that would be too easy. I wanted to create them on the fly!

So whilst I was writing the script I was faced with three challenges:

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Scripting updates to the GPT.ini for the Local Group Policy

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Updated on 27th October 2010.

I came across a challenge whilst working on a big XenApp deployment in a Novell environment. I needed to make changes to the Local Group Policy Object on all Terminal / Citrix servers. This was specifically required for implementation of a logoff script, as logoff scripts are not supported via Zen Polices in a Terminal Services environment.

As always, I wanted to automate it and found that there was a real lack of information about how this can be easily achieved. Anyway, I thought that modifying the Local Policy on all XenApp servers would be a pain, but it ended up being very simple indeed.

Admittedly, I could have just copied a new gpt.ini and scripts.ini into place, but then it would not have respected any previous changes and settings that had already been made to the gpt.ini. So this script checks existing configuration settings before making any changes to the gpt.ini file.

Enjoy!!

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