In further testing on the E7x40 series I’ve run in to Blue Screen errors under Windows 7. Using DaRT Crash Analyzer the offending driver looks to be the Intel Management Engine Driver, TeeDriver.sys:
To resolve, download and install: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=23276&keyword=Intel(R)+Management+Engine+9.5&DownloadType=Drivers&lang=eng
Import this driver to SCCM and integrate this into the SCCM driver pack to resolve this on future deployments.
I’ve been testing Windows 8.1 within the organisation for a few weeks – and have been experiencing issues with Modern (Metro) Applications when interacting with our zScaler proxy. The issue with this, amongst other cookie-based authenticated proxy servers, is that Modern Applictaions do not support the use of the users cookie to provide authentication to the proxy. Essentially we would see issues such as:
For example:
Microsoft User Experience Virtualization is a relatively straightforward technology to deploy – there is no server-side application installation, all you need is a couple of file shares and then an agent deploying to each device. The components of my production deployment are as follows:
DFS shares, each with offline files disabled – UE-V 2.0 doesn’t play well with offline files:
\\domain.local\DFSNOCACHE\UEV2\Settings : All Users that use computers with the agent should have permissions as outlined here \\domain.local\DFSNOCACHE\UEV2\Templates : All Computer Objects that have the agent should have read permissions, again as outlined here
Rather than using all of the built-in templates, copy those that are of interest into the Templates folder, and ensure that you do not register the MS templates at Agent Install (I’ll show you in a moment). I encountered lots of issues with the built-in templates and Office 2013 – see here. For reference I copied:
When it comes to settings synchronisation, you have two options:
We opted for a per-user model, this means that if a user loses their device they can logon to a new laptop – one which we have associated their user account with in SCCM – their personal, user assigned applications install via SCCM and UE-V 2.0 applies their personal settings such as IE homepage, Outlook Signatures, Desktop Background. Essentially its a poor-man’s USMT, it will never provide the incredibly rich capability of USMT as on a per-user basis we’re seeing <5MB per user, in fact typically 2MB.
Finally, to deploy the agent via SCCM use the following command – be sure to update the UNC path with a valid location! The important parts here are:
AgentSetup.exe /quiet /norestart /log "%temp%UE-VAgentInstaller.log" RegisterMSTemplates=FALSE SettingsStoragePath=\\domain.local\DFSNOCACHE\UEV2\Settings\^%username^% SettingsTemplateCatalogPath=\\domain.local\DFSNOCACHE\UEV2\Templates
Remember, with UE-V 2.0 settings are synchronised in different ways:
I extended the Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 Task Seqeucnes today to support the latest Latitude models – the E7240 and E7440. Both are nice machines.
The Windows 7 builds, despite importing the Driver Pack supplied by Dell, were failing with the error:
Windows failed to load because a critical system driver is missing or corrupt. WindowsSystem32driverswPci.sys
After removing the associated drivers from both the E7240 and E7440 Driver Packages the build issues were resolved – ironically, there were no unknown devices following completion of the Task Sequence.
The driver to remove is “wPCI Up stream port (marlon)“
Don’t forget that for Windows 7 you’ll also need the KMDF 1.11 driver, integration instructions here: /microsoft-articles/34-configmgr/2075-configmgr-kernel-mode-driver-framework-1-11-kb2685811
Microsoft, as of 28/01/14, have now issued official Office 2013 UE-V 2.0 Templates – available here: https://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/springboard/archive/2014/01/28/announcing-ue-v-office-2013-template-support.aspx?Redirected=true
Here is a Microsoft RDS Client template I created to sync recent connections and associated logon names between devices.
No warranty implied, use at your own risk.
It’s never as simple as it should be with Microsoft Technologies – UE-V 2.0 is another good example of this. We’ve been trialing this internally for a couple of weeks and noted a strange issue affecting Office 2013:
There was a problem sending the command to the program.
Update 14/02/2014: There is now a hotfix for this issue: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2927019
So in my free time I’ve been looing at UEFI deployments of Winodws 8.1, including Secure Boot, on Dell E6330/E6320 platforms. I noticed that our ESX 5 environment supports EFI firmware, so figured this would be an ideal test bed to ensure that the Task Sequence itself works… not so. I ran into an issue where the deployment to an E63x0 works just fine, however an EFI-enabled Virtual Machine fails to build, getting stuck at the blue Windows Logo during a reboot within the “Setup Windows and ConfigMgr” Task Sequence Step – as below.
This appears to be an VMware EFI issue as reviewing the partition data/boot config shows no issues, and there are no issues/errors reported in the SMSTS.log – the machine simply reboots to perform the next part of the Setup Windows and ConfigMgr step and never boots properly.
A Legacy BIOS deployment of the same TS works without issues to a VMWare Virtual Machine and, as as stated previously, a UEFI/Secure Boot deployment to a Dell Latitude E63x0 works without issue.
Note that I’m running ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 CU3.
A variation on a theme from yesterday where I enabled existing Windows PE images to support DaRT RemoteRecovery.exe on startup.
I also want to have a PXE-delivered DaRT WinRE Task Sequence deployed via ConfigMgr 2012 SP1. In order to automate the build of DaRT 8.1 images that include execution of the RemoteRecovery.exe via Unattend.xml I have modified the DaRT Wizard created PowerShell script. This script, along with pre-requisite file can be downloaded from here. The image will create shortcuts on a chosen file share for DaRT Remote Viewer connections – this means you don’t need the Ticket ID from the console to connect.
When executing the script, you will be prompted for a number of inputs including specifying the target architecture – the script can be used to create x86 or amd64 DaRT WinRE images.
This article is focused on modification of a “true” DaRT image to facilitate RemoteRecovery.exe launch at boot. For existing WindowsPE 4/5 images, refer to this article.
There are a few articles out there that detail DaRT Remote Viewer integration, I was unable to find one single article that covered MDOP 2013 R2 DaRT 8.1 integration with SCCM 2012 Task Sequences – specifically addressing the requirement for RemoteRecovery.exe to launch on WinPE load, not after clicking ‘Next’ on the initial start-up screen.
This article is focused on modification of existing Windows PE 4/5 images to facilitate RemoteRecovery.exe launch at boot. For a “true” DaRT image, refer to this article.
My requirements were ‘simple:’
Initially I reviewed using the Boot Image Prestart Files/Command however this meant that someone had to click ‘Next’ before RemoteRecovery was launched, unless the Task Sequence was mandatory.
Credits, the following sources were (bastardised!) used to compile the scripts/process outlined in this article: