Rodney Buike - Founder and original lazy admin.
Daniel Nerenberg - Microsoft MVP and lazy admin.
Disclaimer
These postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. You assume all risk for your use.
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One of the more frustrating issues with devices and drivers is the Unknown Device. This little tip should make it a little less frustrating. An unknown device will always report a Hardware ID. You can use this ID to determine what the hardware is and that should make finding the driver easier. While the PC vendor may not supply one the hardware vendor should. To determine what the hardware is open Device Manager, right-click on the item and select Properties. Under the Details tab select Hardware ID from the drop down list.
Take note of the ID and then browse to http://www.pcidatabase.com and enter the Vendor ID and the Device ID and the database will provide the information required. In the example in the screenshot I entered 8086 as the Vendor ID (VEN_8086) and 10EA as the Device ID (DEV_10EA) and it was determined that the device in
Continue reading Determine Driver for Unknown Devices
MDT 2010 is a great tool you can use to deploy Windows 7 in your environment. I allows you to use what is known as LTI or Lite Touch Installation to install Windows. It is called LTI because someone needs to touch the machine in the form of booting it up selecting a task sequence and answering a few questions in the LiteTouch Wizard. You can reduce the amount of prompts and make it “lighter” with some tweaking of MDT.
When you kick off the MDT LiteTouch Wizard the first thing it asks you for is the credentials of an account that has permissions to access the deployment share. This can be a domain account or a local account on the MDT server. You can provide this to the deployment technicians or include it in the bootstrap.ini. To include it in the bootstrap.ini right-click on the deployment share and select Properties.
Continue reading Customizing MDT 2010 Wizards
Errors with the MSI Installer, aka MSIExec.exe, show up now and then and can be frustrating to fix. You’ll see these errors trying to install applications, updates, hotfixes and any other type of MSI packages. There are a few things to do to fix this issue depending on how messed up it is. In the simplest of cases simply re-registering the MSI Installer.
Reboot the computer into Safe Mode
From a command line run MSIExec /regserver
Reboot the computer normally
If that does not solve the problem you have to reinstall the MSI Installer. It is another simple process just follow these steps:
Open a command prompt and change directory to %windir%\system32
Run attrib -r -s -h dllcache
Rename the following files to .old
msi.dll
msiexec.exe
msihnd.dll
Reboot
Download Windows Installer (latest version 4.5) and install
Reboot
If you are doing this on Windows Vista/Server 2008/R2 or Windows 7 you will need
Continue reading Repair The MSI Installer
Before capturing your Windows 7 image you need to Sysprep it. The Sysprep tool hasn’t changed but a reminder of the options is always nice. In Windows 7 the Sysprep files are located at:
%WINDIR%\System32\sysprep
You can double click the executable or use the command line to seal the system. The options available are:
When you view the properties of your Windows 7 installation from an OEM install you might see some support information provided by the vendor. You can customize this for your own organization within the Windows image you deploy with some registry modifications.
Open a registry editor and drill down to:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OEMInformation
There are a number of sub keys you can add here to include your own support information.
Key Management Service or KMS is an activation service available to volume license subscribers. The KMS feature is built into Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 and available as an addon for Windows Server 2003. When the time comes to upgrade/retire/migrate the server that is acting as your KMS host you will need to follow these steps in order to keep your client PCs activated (and your users happy).
Removing the KMS Host
Removing the host is a pretty straightforward process. To begin run the following command to uninstall your license keys:
slmgr.vbs –upk
Once that is complete you will need to install the default KMS key with the following command:
slmgr.vbs /ipk {Default KMS key]
The default KMS keys are different based on the OS that your KMS host is running on. Select the correct key from this list.
There are quite a few organizations that have their infrastrucutre running on Windows yet the web presence runs on Apache. This site once ran on Apache as well but I used my Windows CA to create an SSL certificate for the server. Someone asked me how to do this and here is how!
On the Linux server open up a terminal and run the following commands. The first one creates the private key
openssl genrsa -des3 -out mywebserver.key
Next we must validate the key and we can do this with
openssl rsa -noout -in mywebserver.key
Once this is complete we need to create the CSR. The CSR is what we will generate the private key we will hand to the Windows CA.
openssl req -new -key mywebserver.key -out mywebserver.csr
Again we have to validate this key
openssl -noout -text -in mywebserver.csr
Lastly we can “print” the certificate requset to import
Continue reading Windows Certsrv SSL Certificates and Apache
Regular TLA reader Dan Dill has contributed a great article on DHCP user classes. With ever expanding networks, these little used advanced features in Windows will become more critical to all Admins. Thanks Dan for the great arcticle!
DHCP User Classes allow you to apply additional DHCP options, or a modified set of options, to certain clients on your network as identified by a user class id. For example, you may want to define a different gateway, DNS servers, or lease time for a subset of the computers on your network. This can be accomplished by setting a user class id on those clients (2000 and above) and then configuring that class id appropriately on the local DHCP server.
Note: DHCP vendor classes are somewhat similar in function however are set by the hardware or software vendors and are generally not-settable on clients. Windows clients all have a non-configurable
Continue reading DHCP User Classes
Windows 2003 Service Pack 1 included a new feature, RDP over SSL. This feature will allow you to use TLS authentication and encryption with your RDP connections using SelfSSL to create the SSL certificate. It still uses RDP and TCP port 3389 so your firewall rules should not need to be modified.
Before we get started there are a few pre-requisites on both the server side and client side that need to be met first.
Server-side
- The Terminal Server must run 2003 SP1
- The Terminal Server must have a certificate from a Windows CA or a 3rd Party CA
The certificate must meet the following criteria
- Certificate is a computer certificate
- Certificate is for server authentication
- Certificate must have a private key
- Certificate is stored in the TS personal store
- Certificate has a Crytographic Service Provider that can be used for TLS/SSL
The client computer must
Continue reading Configure RDP over SSL with SelfSSL
Windows 2000, XP and 2003 provide a feature called Dynamic Disks. A dynamic disk can contain simple volumes, spanned volumes, striped volumes, mirrored volumes, and RAID-5 volumes. When using dynamic storage, you can perform disk and volume management without the need to restart the computer.
Once the change has been made to Dynamic Disks, they cannot be changed back to Basic Disks without deleting the partitions and rebuilding the disk. This can be troublesome, thankfully there is a way to hack it back to a Basic Disk. Caution: Make sure you have a full, verified backup of all your data before you proceed. If you make an error during this procedure the disk will become corrupt and data loss can occur. Before you begin you will need a tool from the Windows 2000 SP4 Support Tools called DskProbe. DskProbe is a sector editor tool that allows you to edit, save, and
Continue reading Converting Dynamic Disks Back to Basic Disks
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