Dalle & DXter

Deployment Share Sorter

By Fredrik Wall

When working with MDT folders you want to sort
the folders by name to make It look better.

This is not a task you do in the Workbench.

I found a great script for this by Michael Niehaus
at Microsoft. It can be found here.

It will sort every folder in the Deployment Share structure.

The script will sort the structure by making a _TEMP_
folder and move the folder there and then move them
back sorted one by one.

You can do this manually as well in the Workbench
but It’s a big job then.

In my folder structure the comments will be deleted
this way.

 

If I move (copy, paste, delete old folder) a folder
in the Workbench I will get the same result.

The property “Enable this folder” seems to work just fine
with moving folders.

Is this a known bug/feature?

I will write a script that fixes this for me later on next
week. Have to do another script first

 

Application folders in MDT 2010 + PowerShell

By Fredrik Wall

One nice thing with MDT 2010 is the possibility to
make folders in the Application folder.

I like a nice structure of things and with PowerShell
I can make my structure for MDT 2010 Applications,
Operating Systems and Drivers in no time.

cls
$MDTName = "MyMDT"
$MDTServer = "\\padc01"
$MDTApplications = "Antivirus", "Browser", "Office", "Twitter", "Security", "Server"
Add-PSSnapIn Microsoft.BDD.PSSnapIn
New-PSDrive -Name $MDTName -PSProvider MDTProvider -Root $MDTServer\DeploymentShare$
foreach ($MDTApp in $MDTApplications) {
    New-Item -path "$MDTName:\Applications" -enable "True" -Name "$MDTApp Applications"

 -Comments "$MDTApp Applications" -ItemType "folder" -Verbose -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
}

9 lines of code can make 50 folders in 50 sec

And you can make it in less lines!

 

Manage a remote MDT 2010 solution

By Fredrik Wall

This is a follow up on my last blog post about
using PowerShell from a Windows 7 machine
against a MDT 2010 solution (server).

It’s a how to use the Workbench on the
Windows 7 machine to manage a MDT 2010 solution
on a remote server.

First of all you need to go in to the Workbench
and the components section.

Then select Windows Automation Installation Kit x86 or x64
and download it by push the download button. It’s a large
file ~1 GB.

And when It is downloaded, select it again (it’s now under the downloaded section) and push the install button.

Now choose Open Deployment Share on the right side of the workbench.

The path should be like \\server\deploymentshare$

Now you got the same view on your Windows 7 machine
as on the MDT 2010 server.

I love this

But I don’t love the WAIK part, 1 GB of installation to be able to
do remote administration is not so good!

 

MDT 2010 + PowerShell from Windows 7

By Fredrik Wall

I like to do everything from my Windows 7 machine.
One administration point with all of my scripts.

So I wanted to access my MDT 2010 server thru PowerShell
from It too.

As default this will not go.
You need to Add-PSSnapIn

Add-PSSnapIn Microsoft.BDD.PSSnapIn

And you will not have that on your Windows 7 machine

out of the box. But It’s not that hard to fix.

Just install MDT 2010 on the Windows 7 machine as well.

This is a 10 MB installation file only

No problem!

And now we can access our MDT solution remote with

PowerShell.

This is a small test script

cls
Add-PSSnapIn Microsoft.BDD.PSSnapIn
New-PSDrive -Name MyMDT -PSProvider MDTProvider -Root \\padc01\DeploymentShare$
cd MyMDT:
dir

And the output will be something like

WARNING: column "CurrentLocation" does not fit into the display and was removed.

Name           Used (GB)     Free (GB) Provider      Root                          
—-           ———     ——— ——–      —-                          
MyMDT                                  MDTProvider   \\padc01\DeploymentShare$     

Name : Applications

Name : Operating Systems

Name : Out-of-Box Drivers

Name : Packages

Name : Task Sequences

Name : Selection Profiles

Name : Linked Deployment Shares

Name : Media

 

First step with MDT 2010 and PowerShell

By Fredrik Wall

My very first step was to add the Microsoft.BDD.PSSnapIn.

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.BDD.PSSnapin

 

And then I could make a new PSDrive

New-PSDrive -Name MyMDT -PSProvider MDTProvider -Root \\psdc01\DeploymentShare$

 

When I have a PSDrive I can access it thru

cd MyMDT:

dir

Name
—-
Applications
Operating Systems
Out-of-Box Drivers
Packages
Task Sequences
Selection Profiles
Linked Deployment Shares
Media

This means that I can access my MDT solution and do
everything with PowerShell. I’m in love!

But It will get better.
To learn much and fast about how to do tasks with PowerShell you can
use the MDT Workbench.

A simple and nice task is to create a folder for every Office application
that you want to add.

With the Workbench we do like this.

On the last picture, on the right, just above finish
you got “View Script”.

This will open Notepad with a full .ps1 script
with the task that you did in the workbench.

This is nice!

Thanks DXter for the heads up on this.

More on MDT 2010 and PowerShell will come soon.

 

MDT 2010

By Fredrik Wall

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 got released yesterday.
You will find the MDT 2010 site here.

Download it and start to deploy