ZTISelectBootDisk.wsf new with BusType

Several years ago I wrote a script to help select which disk to deploy Windows to during your MDT LiteTouch or ZeroTouch task sequence.

https://keithga.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/ztiselectbootdisk-wsf/

Well, based on a request from my latest client, I have created a similar script that support BusType.

BackGround

My client is trying to install Windows Server 2016 on a Server with a SAN. When the machine boots to WinPE, one of the SAN drives appears *first* as Disk 0 (Zero). By default MDT Task Sequences will deploy to Disk Zero! My ZTISelectBootDisk.wsf already shows how to override. All we need to do is to find a way to tell MDT which disk to choose based on the correct WMI query.

Turns out it was harder than I thought.

What we wanted was the BusType that appears in the “Type” field when you type “Select Disk X” and then “detail disk” in Diskpart.exe.  When we ran “Detail Disk” in DIskpart.exe we could see the bus type: Fibre as compared to regular disks like SCSI or SAS.

The challenge was that the regular Win32_diskDrive WMI query wasn’t returning the BusType value, and we couldn’t figure out how to get that data through other queries.

I tried running some PowerShell queries like ‘Get-Disk’ and noticed that the output type was MSFT_Disk, from a weird WMI Namespace: root\microsoft\windows\storage. But adding that query to the script works! Yea!!!

BusType

What kind of BusTypes are there?

Name	Value	Meaning
Unknown	0	The bus type is unknown.
SCSI	1	SCSI
ATAPI	2	ATAPI
ATA	3	ATA
1394	4	IEEE 1394
SSA	5	SSA
Fibre Channel	6	Fibre Channel
USB	7	USB
RAID	8	RAID
iSCSI	9	iSCSI
SAS	10	Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)
SATA	11	Serial ATA (SATA)
SD	12	Secure Digital (SD)
MMC	13	Multimedia Card (MMC)
Virtual	14	This value is reserved for system use.
File Backed Virtual	15	File-Backed Virtual
Storage Spaces	16	Storage spaces
NVMe	17	NVMe

For this script we are *excluding* the following devices:

Name	Value	Meaning
Fibre Channel	6	Fibre Channel
iSCSI	9	iSCSI
Storage Spaces	16	Storage spaces
NVMe	17	NVMe

Meaning that the *FIRST* fixed device not in this list will become the new *Target* OS Disk. Run this query on your machine to see what disk will become the target:

gwmi -namespace root\microsoft\windows\storage -query 'select Number,Size,BusType,Model from MSFT_Disk where BusType <> 6 and BusTy
pe <> 9 and BusType <> 16 and BusType <> 17' | Select -first 1

Requirements

Reminder that this script requires MDT (latest), and the script should be placed in the %DeploymentShare%\Scripts folder. Additionally you should install all the Storage packages for WinPE, sorry I don’t recall *which* packages I selected when I did testing.

Script

-k

 

 

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PowerShell Switch type never $null

Tales from the code review…

How do you test for a switch type in a PowerShell script?

How do you test for the *absence* of a switch in a PowerShell Script?

Came across this recently, and decided to dig into it further.

Script:

IN the example above, We have a function with a single switch argument. We then test against that argument, displaying “do something” if it’s set, and “Don’t do it” if not set.

Example Output:

PS C:\Users\Keith> C:\Users\Keith\Source\Example\test-switches.ps1
Don't do it
Don't do it
Do Something
Do Something

Cool!  Um… where did the “Never going to do it!” go? Well turns out that even when we don’t specify -test as an argument to the function, it’s still a switch defined as IsPresent = $false. So testing to see if it’s equal to $null will always fail, because it’s never $null.

 

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