Tag Archives: Tech Talk

Deployment4 Beta 3 Observations

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For the last few days, I’ve been looking into the next revision of BDD 2007 – Deployment4.

The first thing that I like about this is that it will now officially support server deployments, as well as desktops. This gives you a good robust, free deployment mechanism for your environment if you don’t want to go heavy duty and get into SCCM (essentials etc).

I have a few scripts, which I use with BDD 2007, to perform things like configuring static IP addresses, and dealing with the XP/2003 Uber bug. Now I haven’t checked the Uber bug is resolved, but you can now configure static IP through the Workbench.

Now I will caveat my observations to say that I’m still pretty new to BDD/Dep4 and the stuff that I’ve seen could just be a PICNIC error ;)

1) There appears to be no keyboard navigation through configuring the details of your Computer/Role/Make and Model/Location object.
On the details tab, which contains your “unattend.txt”-esque configuration options, there doesn’t appear to be anyway of actually navigating your way down the page. It’s a case of mouse in one hand keyboard with the other as you set Display Resolution etc.

2) No multiple assignment ability for driver groups.
When I point the “Out-Of-Box” drivers wizard at the Dell PowerEdge driver CD, it imports about 50 drivers. Great. Now I want to assign them to, say, “Dell PowerEdge Servers” driver group. As fas as I can see this has to be done one driver at a time!

3) Static IP assisgnment, one server per Task Sequence. Really?
I added a new task to a “standard server task sequence” object that I created (formerly known as “builds”). Here you have the ability to add configuration objects, for what appears to be per-NIC. You can give it a name, and then the usual IP data (DHCP, DNS/WINS/Static data). What strikes me as odd is that this appears to be the IP address data for this Task Sequence. That makes the TS only useful to one server. I would have thought that this should be configured under a lower node, more specific to the Computer/Location etc?

4) A new deployment doesn’t appear to be able to use “SkipWizard=YES”. In a quirk (which I suspect I might have read in the release notes to be fair) results in the information given when creating a new Task Sequence (Product Key, Local Admin Password etc) not being retained when you deploy a machine. If you then try and deploy a new machine and have selected to Skip the Wizard in PE, everything just kinda stops after wpeinit.

It works if you step through the wizard (Next, Next Next *yawn*), and you’ve also populated the missing data (Product Code, Local Admin Password) under the details tab, but still, why?

Now, as I said before this could be just me (really, please someone tell me I missed something here), but if it’s not then this seems pretty strange stuff to be experiencing in a Beta 3 release IMHO. Well point 4) is, the rest of course, could just be “By Design”.

Don’t get me wrong I actually really like BDD/Dep 4. The ease of getting a build up and running to deployed is excellent. And I love the way I can throw almost anything at it to get the job done – .Reg, VBS, MSI, EXE, PS1 it will do anything you need it to do – so far ;)

I’ve submitted the above as “feedback” on Connect so I guess we’ll wait and see. I’m hoping some bright tech out there will post in the comments that I’m a muppet and it works fine if you do …. ;)

Ubuntu Feisty and a Creative Xmod sound card

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I ordered a Creative Xmod USB sound card yesterday. The ear phone jack on my laptop gave out on me a few weeks ago, and I finally let the music withdrawal symptoms get the better of me.

At work today one of the guys told me that he’d had an Xmod and replaced it due to a few hassles. Namely on his 64-bit Windows machine it had caused numerous BSOD’s. That would have been sufficient for him to pass it on, but his other two criticisms were that it required external power to run, and drivers installed to get it operational under Windows.

Suffice to say I got home tonight, less than expectant about my new toy. I figured I’d give it a try on my Ubuntu machine, and if it didn’t live up to my expectation – namely no driver hassles, and power drawn off the USB alone, I’d send it back and pick up a Terratec Aureon instead.

Well, my first impression was good. I liked the packaging and the iPod-esque colouring. I’m not an Apple Fanboy by any stretch, but you have to give them points for style!

First up I connected it to my Windows XP laptop, and sure enough I got the New Hardware dialogue. Not a good sign!

I hooked the unit up to the Ubuntu laptop, and opened up a terminal session to see if the OS recognized the device.
cat /proc/asound/cards

Now I’m not brilliant with configuring sound on Linux – despite my work mates labeling me as the token tree-hugging-sandal-wearing Nix-Fanboy ;) I do however know how to configure Amarok to use a different card, so this is where I started. Under Settings | Configure Amarok select the Engine settings from the left side of the dialogue, as below.

Amarok ALSA Device Configuration

The output from the cat command previously gave us the name of the audio device – Xmod. So this is the name we use.

A quick restart of Amarok, had “Blink182 – Feeling This” pumping down my earphones :)

So far so good, but I still had no system sounds, or any of other other media apps (Totem, or VLC etc). What I needed to do was set the Xmod as the default audio card in the system.

A quick look around the OS, and I found – asoundconf. Typing the command gave us a list of expected switches, of which two looked useful: list and set-default-card

asoundconf - configuring the systems default audio card

As you can see, stepping through the switches appears to have set the Xmod as the default card. A quick reboot, and, I suddenly have system sound, and all the media apps are playing nicely!

Despite my earlier worries, the device works well with by Ubuntu machine. No extra drivers required, no extra power needed, and it even works with the hardware sound control!

Tomorrow, there shall be music :)

SAPIEN PrimalScript Snippets for PowerShell

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Just a quick one this morning. Finally delivered a big mile stone at work, so the pressures off and blogging can resume again … :)

I just saw this and thought it worthy of passing on.

I’ve not had a play so I can’t tell you how good/bad it is, but I’ve always liked the Snippets functionality in PrimalScript. It’s a nice way of building functions up into a library of re-usable code :)

They add right into SAPIEN PrimalScript, and let you type any VBScript function or statement name, press Ctrl+J, and see how that VBScript feature is performed in PowerShell

Nice :) I’m a big advocate of learning by trying to achieve objectives when it comes to scripting, but I can see this would be useful for seeing what Cmdlets are the VBScript equivalent. Coupled with the Microsoft VBScript to PowerShell Conversion Guide I can see both as being useful tools to help the learning curve of PowerShell.