Category Archives: ConfigMgr 2012

Simple Configurable Front End SCCM

The business of adding a front end for a PXE-driven SCCM OS build is generally a pretty important consideration if you want to specify some basic information prior to deployment. It’s also something that I’ve felt has never been properly addressed by the SCCM development team. To be fair you could argue it’s not their job to do this but with more functionality being adding to every single aspect of SCCM in every new release, it does feel like something that probably should be looked at in the future.

For now, there are plenty of examples of great front ends on the internet – look up ‘Pretty Good FrontEnd’ by Johan Arwidmark or ‘Pretty Good Front End Clone’ by Maik Koster. These two have been around donkey’s years. One of my favourites is Nicolaj Andersen’s very neat ConfigMgr Front End which offers a whole world of features. Additional infrastructure is necessary to accommodate this however, in the form of web services.

So why create another? Well I’m certainly not pretending to  set the world alight with some kind of ingenious new approach but I always felt there was just a little too much fiddling about with most of the solutions I saw elsewhere. What I wanted was something I could ideally just drop straight into my WinPE image which would just work.  There are certainly features I could add (and may indeed do so if enough people ask) such as ability to remove certain sections, eg, domain, OS, etc. However in an effort to keep things simple I have left this for now.

The Front End

This is a typical illustration of what it looks like in my lab. Most aspects are configurable via a small ini file (yes I know it’s a bit 90’s but let’s face it, it’s a damn sight easier to use than an xml file for this kind of thing). The ini file below is configurable for the OUs in your environment, the domain (or domains) and even colour and font size. One area I went a little off the beaten track is the ability to select different images you want to use in your task sequence. This is great in my lab as I often want to test stuff out on different OS’s and will routinely add a new image when necessary to my tried and trusted task sequence.  As such I’ll detail this a little more.

If you want to use the same task sequence but have different images available in that sequence, you can enter them in the ini file. Just be sure to enter the appropriate option/filter in appropriate task sequence step. For example, in the image above we have  a number of different OS’s which relate to separate images. Under the INSTALL section of your task sequence you might have one or more separate steps to Install Windows 10, Install Server 2016, etc. On each of these steps, click Options and add a Task Sequence Variable condition, eg:

TS VARIABLE: OSDImage Equals <Windows 10 1803>

It is important that the text in the OS box above equals the OSDImage value of your condition. 

Of course, you can just add a description in the Config.ini file instead and have one image step in your task sequence with no condition set and all will be well. I suspect this is what most people will want. The option to do it this way is just there if you want it.

CONFIG.INI

Typical Config.ini settings below. This file must always exist in the exact same folder as the NewFrontEnd.exe executable.

:: [ORG_UNIT] - Enter all OUs you want displayed in format OU=Dept, OU=Org, DC=domain, DC=suffix one after the other.
:: [DOMAIN] - In most cases, this is more for show but can be used to build a workgroup machine too if WORKGROUP is specified underneath the primary domain.
:: [OS] - If your task sequence can build more than one image, add it here, eg Windows 10 1607 LTSB. Then add a task sequence variable condition called OSDIMAGE and equal it to the image name in your TS.

:: [MISC]
:: LOGO, recommended max size is approx W:120, H:120 for a font size of 8-10
:: BACKGROUND, Enter standard OS colour names, eg Red, DarkRed, Marroon, MidnightBlue, etc
:: FONTSIZE, recommend, 8-10 but it will go bigger. Seems to jump in 2s, eg, 8,10,12, etc. This has a bearing on the size of the form.
:: FONTCOLOR (American spelling, sorry) see BACKGROUND, above.
:: SMSTSPREFERREDADVERTID, If specified, enter the Deployment ID of the task sequence you want to run. This will override any other advertised task sequence either 'available' or 'required' and the wizard won't show.

:: HIRESDISPLAY, If HIRESDISPLAY=True the size of the form is increased so it doesn't get 'scrunched up' on the display. This has been tested against a Surface Pro 4.

:: NOTE - [ORG_UNIT], [DOMAIN] and [OS] should all have at least one value (ideally) so the interface has something to show. Settings under [MISC] can be removed or ignored by adding a semicolon before the setting.

[ORG_UNIT]
OU=Workstations,OU=Bondynet,DC=BONDYNET,DC=org
OU=Servers,OU=Bondynet,DC=BONDYNET,DC=org
OU=Secure Workstations,OU=Bondynet,DC=BONDYNET,DC=org

[DOMAIN]
BONDYNET.org
WORKGROUP

[OS]
Windows 10 1803
Windows 10 1607
Windows Server 2016
Windows 2012 R2
Windows 10 1607 LTSB
Windows 7
Windows 8.1
Windows Server 2008

[MISC]
LOGO=logo-3.png
BACKGROUND=LightSteelBlue
FONTSIZE=8
FONTCOLOR=Black
SMSTSPREFERREDADVERTID=PR120019

WinPE Setup

So how do you get this working in WinPE?

  1. Create a share somewhere and drop NewFrontEnd.exe, Config.ini and your company logo png into it (and/or possibly RunFEUI.vbs – see end of post)
  2. In SCCM go to your chosen boot image, right-click | properties | Optional Components. Select Microsoft .NET (WinPE-NetFx). This is a C# application so it needs this option available in your boot image binaries.
  3. Select the Customisation tab. Under Prestart Command Settings enter “X:\sms\PKG\SMS10000\NewFrontEnd.exe”
  4. Select Include files for the prestart command
  5. Select the share you created above with the files in for the source directory.

If you want to, add a background, click OK  and you’re done. After the update distribution points wizard has completed, double check the Last Update information in the bottom section of the SCCM console to ensure the time matches the time you ran the wizard and everything has updated as it should. This is important as it hasn’t usually finished updating just because the wizard progress bar has completed.

.

For The Adventurous.

One of the neat things about using the above method is that there is no ugly command prompt in the background as it brings up the front end interface. However the downside of this is that all the files are inside your WinPE image so if you want to update them you have to go through the above process once again which is both time consuming and laborious. One solution though is to simply point to a script that will map a drive to a share that exists elsewhere on your network and execute the files from there instead. This facilitates updating the files on the fly.

In the zip file included below, there is a file called RunFEUI.vbs. Simply open it and edit it to fit your environment (ie edit line 4 with the appropriate drive mapping and account).

DOWNLOAD HERE:

NewFrontEnd_v1.2

Please ask any questions or suggestions for improvements in the comments below.

[*** UPDATE ***]

I have added a new variable, HIRESDISPLAY=True. If you have a Surface or another slate type device, it is common to see forms get squashed up. Set this if you need a larger form to display.

0x8007000f Task Sequence Error

Really quick post on issue experienced recently.

We were trying to build some Lenovo T470Ps and one was exhibiting this error just before the task sequence was to start and failed as a result before we even got off the ground. The error translates to The system cannot find the drive specified. However I knew for a fact that the drivers were OK as other T470Ps were building fine.

Transpires that somewhere along the way, something had indeed got mixed up on the disk and it was having problems with the config. I initially tried a DISKPART then CLEAN but this wasn’t enough and it was continuing to fail.

In the end I resorted to doing the task sequence’s job manually and recreating the partitions as follows:

Open CMD prompt (F8):

1. Diskpart
2. Select disk 0 (0 being the disk to setup)
3. Clean
4. Convert gpt
5. Create partition efi size=300
6. Format quick fs=FAT32
7. Create partition msr size=128
8. Create partition primary
9. Assign letter=c
10.Format quick fs=NTFS

Exit DISKPART and try again – this time the task sequence continued as expected.

Adding a Software Update Point to a Secondary Site (for those who already know how to add it to the primary site!)

This is something I’ve meant to get round to writing about for months as the first time I did this I couldn’t find any direct answers in the multitude of blogs I read about it.

On the face of things, installing WSUS/SUP on a secondary site sounds pretty straightforward if you’re used to adding them to a primary site but when you start it soon becomes clear there are a few unanswered questions which start to materialise. It’s important to first consider whether a SUP is even required for the secondary site: remember, the update packages will be present anyway. The secondary site SUP is really only there for scanning purposes and to relieve associated traffic which is really quite minimal. Assuming you are over this and need it anyway then here are a few other things to consider, some of which have changed since CM2007.

  1.  Since CM2012, there is now a DB on the secondary site so should we be installing to that?
  2.  WSUS Content?
  3. How does it interact with the Primary SUP?

This blog is only intended to answer one or two questions you might have as regards specifics of installing on a secondary site and there are plenty of answers out there for general installation. In short, the SUP on the secondary site is a secondary SUP and when you install it ConfigMgr will actually take care of marrying it up to the Primary SUP.

So the high level tasks are as follows:

  1. Install the pre-req’s for a Software Update Point. I thoroughly recommend Nickalaj A’s PreRequisite Tool  for this job, see https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/ConfigMgr-2012-R2-e52919cd. I must confess this has made me lazy and I barely remember what the pre-reqs are these days but to be honest I don’t need to with this.
  2. Install the database on the secondary site SQL instance. Best practice is to have separate instances but I’ll leave that to you. Personally I don’t find there is any real performance issues using the same instance. Also, as an aside, if you have full SQL on the primary, (and you will) then I don’t really see why you wouldn’t use it on the secondary. Why use SQL Express when the licence is free for the full version? Just my opinion though.
  3. WSUS Content should always be local. It’s a requirement to specify this during installation but it’s not really used when part of a SUP in ConfigMgr.
  4. Finally, after WSUS installation, add the SUP role to the site. ConfigMgr will take care of the rest. Click on the secondary site under  the Sites node, and click the SUP under the site component properties to check the sync status. It should be greyed out because SCCM has recognised it as a child of the primary SUP.
  5. A good, detailed explanation of the whole process can be found here

Happy Deployments…

New OSD Task Sequence Not Displaying

Recently been testing an upgrade scenario from ConfigMgr 2012 SP2 to Current Branch 1702 and during the course of putting together the legacy environment I came across a strange issue I’d not seen before. Essentially it goes like this:

A new OSD task sequence is created (doesn’t matter whether it is MDT-infused or not) and is deployed to All Unknown Computers. In my case I was using boot media to reach the WinPE environment on my test VM but there were no task sequences displayed. Checking the smsts.log file in the WinPE environment, it suggests that no policies are found.

The first time this happened the task sequence eventually appeared after about an hour or so. The next day I created a new one and exactly the same thing happened, with just the old TS showing up. I then saw this thread and changed my new task sequence availability time back 1 day. Et voila, the task sequence appeared.

Hope this helps anyone else scratching their head…