Monthly Archives: September 2009

One reason I don’t use Linux

Posted on by
Reply

I’d like to take a moment to relay to you one, of many, reasons that I don’t use Linux, or take it seriously at all. This is partially for others to read, and partially as personal documentation so the next time I decide to try Linux, I can stop myself before I do.

So I recently installed Ubuntu 9.04 into a VMware virtual machine so that I could mess around with compiling a mini Linux kernel. I wanted to do this, because I recently heard someone talk about using a very lightweight Linux distro with Intel vPro to remotely repair a broken Windows operating system. Before anyone comments on that, a truly broken Windows OS is something we see less and less of as the Windows platform progresses beyond XP. Anyway, I had Ubuntu running in the VM, and I wanted to install the VMware Tools. This is where things start to get ugly.

I selected the Install VMware Tools option from the menu of the VMware console, and hoped this would invoke the installer for it. Unfortunately, I was greeted with no visible change on the guest OS. OK, no problem I said, I’ll just open up the CD drive from the file explorer, but oh yeah, on a fresh install of Ubuntu, I can’t even get the file explorer to open! It just sits there pretending like it’s about to open, but never does. Alright, so I can’t do it graphically, I guess I’ll just open a terminal and run it from there. After all, everything in Linux is about the command line, right?

I open a terminal, figure out where the CD is mounted, and navigate to that directory. I have two files, an RPM and a tar.gz file. I’ve come across plenty of tar.gz’s before, so I copy that over to my Documents folder and extract it. Next, I cd into the folder it created during extraction, and list out the files there. There’s a perl script aptly named vmware-install.pl, so I call that. Instead of getting a simple graphical interface to install the tools, I start getting bombarded with what seems like an endless number of prompts, asking me where I want to install this or that. I don’t know where to put everything, nor do I really care which components go where, so I hit Enter a million times until the installation finally finished.

Once the installation completed, I was told I had to restart X and run /usr/bin/vmware-toolbox (I don’t have a quote of the message) to get VMware integration to work. After rebooting the VM, I still didn’t have functionality like seamless mouse integration, so I ran the vmware-toolbox utility, and sure enough it worked after that. Here’s the problem though … first off, running the toolbox not only pops up a user interface that I have to minimize if I don’t want it to bug me, and secondly, why should I have to manually run the toolbox under my user context, in order to get full VMware integration?

So yeah, after all that wasted effort, and repeated attempts to use Linux in the past, I really don’t see the value in it.

PowerShell: Clean up AD Computer Accounts

Posted on by
13

Update (2009-11-03): I have posted a newer version of this script. Please visit this link for information.

—————

I recently wrote a script to clean up workstation accounts in our Active Directory domain. It’s not perfect, but it was a good learning experience, as I found out there are some gritty details when working with Integer8 values. I plan on adding more features in the future, including logging results of the script to an Excel document, for easy readability. If you have any suggestions, please send them my way; I may or may not have time to implement them, but am always open to constructive

Running ccmsetup synchronously

Posted on by
Reply

I recently ran into a situation where my MDT task sequence was failing due to a couple failed application installs. The symptom was a return value of 1 coming from our Office 2007 and Office Communicator 2005 app installs.

I finally checked out the setup log file for Office 2007, and discovered that the MSIexec service was “busy.” I opened up the task sequence log and looked at what was running just prior to the Office 2007 install, and it turned out to be the SCCM client. Knowing that ccmsetup runs asynchronously, I started looking for a method of running it synchronously, so that the task sequence would not proceed before it completed.

As it turns out, the /NoService parameter to ccmsetup causes the SCCM client to install synchronously. This makes the installation of the client much more predictable, and reduces or prevents the conflict of SCCM and other software installations during a task sequence.