Download Ignite 2017 videos locally

Thanks to Michel de Rooij on TechNet gallery for posting this slick script where you can download TechNet content locally to your machine.

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Ignite-2016-Slidedeck-and-296df316

I wanted to select which videos to download, and wrote this powershell script to use out-gridview to download content. It calls the script above.

Usage:

You can run the command directly from powershell, just cut and paste this command:

iwr https://gist.githubusercontent.com/keithga/cb124fa3d2f96ac58470831c52d359a7/raw/8040ddaf971a27f0b35fd4b5e9c131048d29e8a5/get-Ignite2017Content.ps1 | % Content | Iex 

Comments:

• Will download and cache the content locally so you can re-run the script repeatedly without having to wait to parse the website.
• Will then display all the sessions in the PowerShell Out-GridView. Out-gridview is powerful.

• Then will ask If you want to save the list to a *.html file for online viewing later.
• Will also ask if you want to save the offline content to a local file.

The script:

 

Update CustomSettings.ini file remotely!

Got on a discussion this week with someone how to use PowerShell to update an MDT CustomSettings.ini file over the network. Well a *lot* of CS.ini files.. 🙂

My manager is the Global Ops Manager and now he is asking me to find a way to run [update of customsettings.ini] on about 50 servers worldwide so the other MDT admins don’t have to log onto each server just to add one line.

The example given was to update the AdminPassword in CS.ini. I hope this company is following best practices, and disabling the local Administrator account and/or changing the Password once joined to the domain or connected to SCCM.

Anywho, INI files are a tad bit difficult to modify in Powershell because there are no native PowerShell or .NET functions to perform the action. So instead we need to do some ugly Pinvoke calls to the appropriate Win32 API.

-k

New script – Import Machine Objects from Hyper-V into ConfigMgr

Quick Post, been doing a lot of ConfigMgr OSD Deployments lately, with a lot of Hyper-V test hosts.

For my test hosts, I’ve been creating Machine Objects in ConfigMgr by manually entering them in one at a time (yuck). So I was wondering what the process is for entering in Machine Objects via PowerShell.

Additionally, I was curious how to inject variables into the Machine Object that could be used later on in the deployment Process, in this case a Role.

Up next, how to extract this information from VMWare <meh>.

New Sample for MDT (Custom Actions)

MDTLTIPSSampleAction

MDT Litetouch Action Property Page Sample

Background

MDT has several pre-defined pages for common task sequence editing tasks. You’ve seen them in the MDT Litetouch Task Sequence Editor, under General, Disks, Images, Settings, and Roles.

They help abstract the ugly command line and scripting code behind the scenes for the user.

Recently I had an idea for a super-wiz-bang property page type for MDT Litetouch, and asked “are there any MDT LTI samples out there?”. I knew Config Mgr had a SDK Sample and I’ve been using it for a while now to create SCCM Task Sequence Actions pages.

The answer came back “There was an MDT Litetouch SDK, but not anymore.” (Long story for another day)

“Someone should create a sample!” I said!

“Cool Keith, when you figure it out, can you share the results? :)” For those of you who wonder, how does one become a Microsoft MVP? This, so here we go.

The Basics

C#

MDT Task Sequence Action Pages are simply C# Windows Form Control Library, with some standard API interfaces so it can be called from the Litetouch Wizard Host. The MDT team designed the API to closely resemble the System Center Configuration Manager Action Page API.

• There are entry points for when the control is initialized.
  • Use this opportunity to load the UI elements with the saved data from the PropertyManager (aka TS.xml)
• There are entry points for when the “OK” and “Apply” buttons are pressed.
  • Use this opportunity to save the UI elements with to the PropertyManager

There are several dependent classes required by the sample, they are contained in the ‘c:\program files\Microsoft Deployment Toolkit\bin\Microsoft.BDD.Workbench.dll’ assembly, so you will need add this reference to your project.

Anything else you want to add in the control, can be done if you know the correct C# code to get the job done.

Registration

Once you have created the DLL Library, we will need to add it so MDT Litetouch console knows about it.

First off, copy the DLL to the ‘c:\program files\Microsoft Deployment Toolkit\bin’ folder.

Secondly, we’ll need to add an element to the actions.xml file.

<action>
	<Category>General</Category>
	<Name>Install PowerShellGet Action</Name>
	<Type>BDD_MDTLTIPSSampleControl</Type>
	<Assembly>MDTLTIPSSampleAction</Assembly>
	<Class>MDTLTIPSSampleAction.MDTLTIPSSampleControl</Class>
	<Action>powershell.exe -Command  Install-Package -Force -ForceBootStrap -Name (New-Object -COMObject Microsoft.SMS.TSEnvironment).Value('Package')</Action>
	<Property type="string" name="Package" />
</action>

For this sample, I included a PowerShell libary module with two functions, one to register the new control, the other to remove the control. Easy!

The Sample

The sample in this case is pretty small.

https://github.com/keithga/MDTLTIPSSampleAction

There is one TextBox (as shown above), that prompts the user for the name of a PowerShell Package.

The package name get’s added to the TS.XML, along with the command, in this case it calls PowerShell.exe with the cmdlet Install-Package. We use COM to connect to the SMS environment space to get the package name and go.

You can use the build.ps1 script to compile the sample, and create PowerShell library to install the control within MDT Litetouch.

Future

Well I created this sample, because I have some ideas for some MDT LiteTouch (and SCCM) Action controls.

• Fancy UI for installation of applications through Chocolatey
• Run scripts and modules from PowerShellGallery.com
• Other ideas, let me know (comments or e-mail)

Keith

New Tool: Get the Latest Windows 10 Cumulative Updates!

TL;DR – Programmatically get the latest Windows 10 Cumulative Updates!

Got a request from someone on an internal e-mail Distribution list recently, asking how to find out the latest Windows 10 (or Windows Server 2016) Cumulative Update.

Normally you can find these updates by going to this Microsoft KB article, then finding the right Operating System Version. Then you use the KB article number to go to Windows Update, and find the correct download link, then download the file.

I wanted to update this for another project, so I took it as a challenge to code in PowerShell.

New Tool

For this tool, I placed the source code up on GitHub.com, in a new gist. A gist is just a file that can be edited, version controlled, and shared out publicly on the GitHub.com site.

Given a Windows Version (build number), and a couple other search strings, will programmatically determine what the correct download links are for this Windows 10 (or Windows Server 2016).Â

The output can also be piped into BITS so you can just download locally.

Example

Get the links for the latest Windows 10 Version 1703 Updates:

 

Additionally we can also download the files using the BITS command Start-BITSTransfer

 

Source

 

 

 

Decrypting the HP BIOSConfigUtility64.exe password

First off, for those of you who asked, I did leave 1E last week, off to try new things. Thought I’d take some time off during May, and then look for new opportunities. The future is wide open :^)

In the mean time, I did come across this post today about decrypting passwords with the BIOSConfigUtility64.exe utility.

https://www.serializing.me/2016/10/15/hpqpswd-encrypted-passwords-decryption/

And reminded me of some work I did recently at 1E on their BIOS 2 UEFI toolset. The HP tool did set off some red flags for me, the tool was able to take a plaintext password and put the encrypted value in a *.bin file without asking for an encryption key!?!? How did it do that? I figured it was because the tool stored the encryption key for the password within the executable itself. That’s not optimal (it’s unsecure), but not uncommon.

So I spent some time trying to reverse engineer the process, “link -dump /imports” revealed several cryptographic calls like CryptImportKey(), and with some time using trusty WinDBG.exe, I was able to locate the key. I wondered if HP would try to hide the key, but it was there in plain sight. I wrote a test program, but in my case I didn’t write a tool to decrypt the password, I wrote a tool to perform the encryption.  My thoughts were to provide a centralized password storage mechanism for HP, Dell and Lenovo, and I wondered if the HP toolset was a good starting point. 1E didn’t go down that route but the reverse engineering the HP tool was interesting.

It does bring up an interesting ethical dilemma for Engineers like myself. Something that you see on the news whenever someone discovers a new vulnerability in an OS, or Web Browser: Do you keep the vulnerability secret, or do you tell the public, knowing that some Black Hat could use the vulnerability to write an exploit and expose sensitive data?  In my case, I decided not to reveal the exploit, but Duarte chose to reveal it. Who is right?

I guess the only thing I can say is this is a good learning opportunity to discuss security/encryption of secrets like passwords. If you are an IT administrator, be weary of tools that can encrypt data magically without an encryption key, it’s not magic, they are encrypting the data with *something* and it’s possible the key is stored locally in an unsecure fashion. Better to store the passwords in a more secure location, with a more secure encryption, and then convert to the HP Password at the “Last-Minute” when preforming the actual task sequence.

This is a similar problem with other tools that “appear” to encrypt data, but store the data in a manner that *can* be easily extracted. Like the AdministratorPassword field in the unattend.xml file, and the Password in the SysInternals AutoLogon.exe tool. Both tools store passwords in an easily recoverable fashion. I’ve seen too many administrators fall for the illusion that these are secure, they are not.

-k

Hope to see many of you at MMS MOA in May 2017!!! I’ll be there.

Formatting a removable USB drive with 2 partitions

TL;DR – Starting with Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14965, you can format any “Removable” USB Flash Drive with more than one partition. Perfect for installation of large (over 4GB) WIM files on UEFI machines!

 

Hey all, back from a week at the Microsoft MVP summit, a Week in the UK, and a week in Arizona.

A few weeks ago at the Microsoft MVP summit, an engineering manager with the Windows Product group made an offhand comment about formatting a removable USB drive with two partitions. This took several of us by surprise, because historically, this hasn’t been supported widely without converting to a Fixed disk or something.

Mike Terrill (and Mike Niehaus) already beat me to the punch with some posts, but I wanted to share my results. :^)

The Background

Why is this important? Well as I mentioned in another blog post, as more and more people are booting to UEFI, on USB flash drives formatted with Fat32, with WIM images over 4GB in size, that causes a problem because Fat32 can’t hold files over 4GB in size.

Another solution would be to use the Rufus tool to split a USB drive into multiple partitions with a hidden fat32 partition. However, the problem here is that the hidden partition uses a special UEFI app that is not signed, so it won’t work on UEFI machines with Secure Boot enabled.

This has become even more interesting since Windows Server 2016 came out, with a base WIM image for standard Server SKU that is over 4GB in size. Hum…

The Hardware

I tested on several different USB makes using my Windows 10 (version 1607) laptop. Some would allow me to create a 2nd partition on a removable Flash Drive, others would not giving me an error:

DISKPART> create part pri

No usable free extent could be found. It may be that there is insufficient 
free space to create a partition at the specified size and offset. Specify
different size and offset values or don't specify either to create the maximum 
sized partition. It may be that the disk is partitioned using the MBR disk
partitioning format and the disk contains either 4 primary partitions, (no
more partitions may be created), or 3 primary partitions and one extended
partition, (only logical drives may be created).

Mostly the older and/or cheaper drives didn’t work, but most of the newer and/or name brand drives did work.

Finally I narrowed it down to two different models, both my favorites:

• Sandisk Extreme USB 3.0 Flash Drive – 32GB   – 2 years old – worked flawlessly.
• Transcend 8GB JetFlash V10 USB 2.0 Flash Drive  – 6+ years old  – would not create a 2nd partition no matter what I tried on Windows 10 Version 1607

Then I tested against three Operating Systems: Windows 10 Version 1607, Windows 10 Preview, and Windwos 7.0 SP1. All using Diskpart to create multiple partitions.

The script

Diskpart.exe –>

sel disk 1
clean
create part pri size=450
format quick fs=fat32
assign
create part pri
format quick fs=ntfs
assign
exit

The Results:

                                 SanDisk           Transcend
Windows 7 SP1 Build 7601           Pass               Fail
Windows 10  Version 1607           Pass               Fail
Windows 10 Preview 14965           Pass               Pass   

I was able to format my SanDisk into multiple partitions using Windows 7 and beyond.

But I was not able to format the Transcend drive into multiple partitions using Windows 7 or Windows 10 Version 1607, but I was able to partition into multiple partitions on the new Windows 10 Insider Preview 14965.

That’s new!

I haven’t done enough testing using the removable flash drives on older machines, to see if the partitions are still visible, but the results look promising for a start.

Update #1 – 11/28/16:

Found out today that the reason that my SanDisk Extreme disk worked on Windows 7 and Windows 10 1607 may be because the removable Flash disk is reported as “Fixed” rather than “Removable” to the OS. Link.

Update #2 – 11/28/16:

I noticed that when taking the “removable” disk formatted with 2 partitions from Windows 10 Preview 14965 over to Windows 10 Version 1607, only the first partition was visible. As a work around I tried moving the main NTFS partition first and the Fat32 partition second.

sel disk 1
clean
create part pri
shrink desired=450
format quick fs=ntfs
assign
create part pri
format quick fs=fat32
assign
exit

Display WPF XAML code in PowerShell

Last week I went to the Minnesota Management Summit at the Mall of America #MMSMOA, and I got inspired to work on a few projects in my backlog.

One of the presentations I went to was with Ryan Ephgrave (@EphingPosh on Twitter.com), and his talk on “Better Know a PowerShell UI“.

Overall it was a great presentation, and I learned a lot. And got me thinking about some of the things I could do with a framework I started earlier in the year but never got around to finishing.

WPF4PS

Without further adieu, I present Windows Presentation Framework for PowerShell (WPF4PS). It is also the first project I’ve released as source code on GitHub:

https://github.com/keithga/WPF4PS

Background

Most WPF + PowerShell examples are created with a lot of custom code to add in event handlers for the User Interface elements. The goal is to find all control elements on the page and if there is a pre-defined function created, then use it. Which means minimal code for overhead.

Example

Here is a fully functional example:

• Load the WPF4PS module
• Import a XAML defined in Visual Studio
• Create a scriptBlock to handle the button Click
• Create a HashTable to pass data between our script that the XAML Window
• Call the Show-XAMLWindow function
• Get the value of the TextBox from the Hash

<#
.SYNOPSIS
WPF4PS framework Examples

.DESCRIPTION
Simple Example

.NOTES
Copyright Keith Garner, All rights reserved.

#>

[cmdletbinding()]
param()

import-module $PSScriptRoot\wpf4ps -force

$MyXAML = @"
<Window x:Class="WpfApplication1.MainWindow"
 xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
 xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
 xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
 xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
 xmlns:local="clr-namespace:WpfApplication1"
 mc:Ignorable="d"
 Title="MainWindow" FontFamily="Segoe WP Semibold" Width="400" Height="300" Name="WindowMain" >
 <Grid>
 <Label>Hello World</Label>
 <Button x:Name="Button1" Content="Big Red Button" Width="125" Height="25" Background="#FFDD0000" Margin="0,60,0,0"/>
 <TextBox x:Name="textBox1" Height="23" Width="200" />
 </Grid>
</Window>
"@

$MyControl = [scriptBlock]{

    function global:button1_click()
    {
        "Click the Big Red Button`n" + $TextBox1.TExt  | show-MessageBox 
        $WindowMain.Close()
    }

}

$MyHash = [Hashtable]::Synchronized(@{ textBox1 = "Hello World" })

Show-XAMLWindow -XAML $MyXAML -ControlScripts $MyControl -SyncHash $MyHash

$MyHash.TextBox1 | Write-Host

Next

My goal is to work out the kinks and eventually upload/share this on PowerShellGallery.com.

For example:

• I created two Show-XAMLWindow() functions in the library, one inline and another Async. I still don’t know what the usage case of Async is.
• Ryan Ephgrave did some XAML + Powershell examples in his “Better Know a PowerShell UI” blog series with XAML “Binding” elements, something I have not used in the past, so I excluded them from this package.
• I had to do some weirdness with the declaring the functions above as “global” to make them visible to the Module

If you have feedback on the layout or usage, please let me know.

-k

Fix for Windows 1511 ADK bug

First off, yes, I have a new job working for 1e! I’m super excited, and I should have posted something about it, but I’ve been super busy. My first day on the job was at a customer site in Dallas, and I’ve been on the go ever since, working on this and that (stay tuned :^).

As many of you may have known, there has been a pretty big bug in the Windows 10 Version 1511 ADK, it’s caused all kinds of interop problems with Configuration Manager. Well Microsoft released a fix today! KB3143760. Yea!

Well I opened up KB3143760, and yikes! The instructions are a bit dry. Mount this, patch that, watch out for the data streams!

I needed to patch my local Windows 1511 ADK installation because I’m working on a SCCM+MDT Refresh scenario, and I don’t want to uninstall the 1511 ADK. Perfect timing, if only there was a way to automate this..

Repair-1511ADK.ps1

Here is a link to a PowerShell script I wrote to auto-magically patch your WinPE files!

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=5407B03614346A99!158500&authkey=!AHWArN5C7FyRPIY&ithint=file%2cps1

This script will:

• Download the patch (no need to go through the E-Mail process)
• Take care of all the stream issues (really I don’t use IE/Edge, so no security streams)
• Auto extract the patch contents
• Mount the wim file
• Patch the appropriate dat files
• Fix the permissions
• Dismounts the WIM
• Cleans up all left over files

So, for example, if you wanted to patch all of the WinPE Wim files in the ADK directory (before importing them into SCCM), you can run the following command:

get-childitem 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Assessment and Deployment Kit\*.wim' -recurse | .\Repair-1511ADK.ps1 -verbose

Lately, when programming in PowerShell, I have taken the “write-host considered harmful” rule to heart, so by default, there is *NO* std console output. Instead, I redirect most information output to “verbose”, so if you want to see what is happening in the background, use the -verbose switch.

-k

Hopefully, moving forwards, this will be the *last* time I place a new script up on OneDrive, really I should be moving towards something more… modern… like GitHub.

MDT package now on Chocolatey.org ready for Windows 10!

Been a while since I posted, I’ve been busy with Surface, Windows 10, and other Kits. But my chocolatey package just got approved, so I thought I would share.

I’ve been following the progress of PowerShell’s OneGet, and http://Chocolatey.org for a while now, and thought it was time to stick my toes in and create a package for public use. MDT seemed like a great start.

As you may already know OneGet is a new feature of PowerShell, included in Windows 10 and available through WMF 5.0 that allows for the installation of packages over the internet. Chocolatey is one of the back-end providers, with a great collection of apps ready for installation.

With the recent release of MDT 2013 Update 2, it seemed like a great opportunity to practice my packaging skills. Eventually I created a PowerShell script to auto generate the chocolatey package (not shown here), it would download the MSI files, and extract out the MSI Product Code and Checksum values. You can see the code generated on the Chocolatey MDT page.

Now to install MDT on Windows 10 (or Windows Server 2016), we can run the commands:

set-executionpolicy RemoteSigned; 
Install-Package -Name MDT -ProviderName Chocolatey `
-ForceBootstrap -Force -Verbose

How it works

First step we need to do on clean machine is to set the execution policy:

set-executionpolicy RemoteSigned

Chocolatey has some PowerShell scripts that run in the background, so we need to allow PowerShell to run these commands with the Set-ExecutionPolicy command. Most Powershell users run this command anyways, so it’s not that uncommon.

Then we install the package using the PowerShell 5.0 “Install-Package” cmdlet built into Windows 10:

Install-Package -Name MDT -ProviderName Chocolatey

We must specify the “-ProviderName Chocolatey” parameter the fist time we call Install-Package so the chocolatey Provider is installed, MDT is only known to Chocolatey at this time.

Install-Package will prompt us to confirm installation of the chocolatey provider, we can skip this with the -ForceBootStrap parameter. Additionally, Install-Package will also ask for confirmation before installing MDT, and we can sip the confirmation with the -Force Paramater.

I like to see what is going on the background, so I add the -verbose parameter, and my screen fills with yellow:

We can see Install-Package downloading MicrosoftDeploymentToolkit2013_x64.msi from the Microsoft web servers.

ADK

The Windows 10 ADK package has also been uploaded to Chocolatey, but hasn’t been officially approved yet, so when you try to run the “windows-ADK” package it will install the older Windows 8.1 version. We can force the Windows 10 ADK to install with a version parameter. Additionally, the default version of the “Windows-ADK” package does not install USMT, so to install everything we will need the “windows-adk-all” package (which is a lot of stuff, sorry).

install-package -ProviderName Chocolatey -Name Windows-ADK-All `
-force -Verbose -MinimumVersion 10.1.10586.0

More information:

https://chocolatey.org/packages/MDT

-k