Carpet Bomberz Inc.

Category: technology

General technology, not anything in particular

  • With a good autounattend, now have to move to Office Setup

    English: M in blue square (similar to seen on )
    English: M in blue square (similar to seen on ) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Desktop Support in the raw (boring!)

    One of the many things I would set about doing at my old job was getting things updated to install new Windows/Office disk images for rebuilt or newly built desktops and laptops. One of the first tasks was to build a from scratch WIM from the base install media (Win7 install.wim and the Office 2010 Pro .iso disk images) Now I want to customize the OCT (Office Customization Tool) and get the Office 2010 install just right for a first install on a newly rebuilt system. I’ve played with the OCT in the past, but there’s also an unattend.xml file one could use instead. Might go that route now that I got the Win7 setup running under autounattend.xml (no more OCT)

    One thing that is making this XML learning process easier is the edit xml, install test build, observe failures and re-edit round trip is an Oracle VirtualBox I’ve got installed. I’m using the Win7 Setup .iso as a mount point within Virtual Box. It is the first CD drive. Then I have the autounattend.xml sitting in another .iso which I mount as the secondary CD drive. That combo forces the Win7 setup to ‘see’ the autounattend.xml file and start customizing the install as it goes along. One of the cool utilities included with the Windows Automated Install Kit (WAIK 3.1) is a command line program called oscdimg, it will create a .iso out of any folder you choose. That’s what I do to create that secondary CD mount point in VirtualBox. And I never once have to change it, all I have to do is create a new .iso every time I edit the autounattend.xml file (each just adding or deleting a comma and I can start all over again without reconfiguring the VM!) This has saved me countless hours of attempting to do this on real hardware (which is absolutely unnecessary in this case) until I can get it just right.

    And let me say there’s a lot of ground to cover and barriers to entry before you can get it ‘just right’. Some of the features provided in Autounattend.xml don’t work. Literally hands down, attempting to add a trusted zone in IE during the Win7 Setup process doesn’t work. And better yet, there’s discussion board entries that CONFIRM it doesn’t work. I’m so glad people participate in these company sponsored fora for the whole world to see. I’m so glad, I didn’t beat my head and heart out trying to get this one ‘feature’ nay, ‘bug’ to work properly. There are a multitude of other ways to achieve the same goal, so I’m pursuing it doing the Copy Profile = true route and add the Trusted Zone URLs to my admin profile let that become the default profile on the machine. Then capture the whole kitten-ka-boodle using Sysprep/GImagex on that idealized Dell Optiplex 960 with all drivers persisted. That’s going to be my universal WIM to start out with. We’ll see how close I can hit that mark.

    As it turns out I did go through a number of revisions of this disk image until I perfected it by Feb. 2013. Then I updated the drivers and patches and so forth in June to come out with a grand final WIM for doing all the desktops, laptops for my old office. Since then I had to turn this work over to a contractor who just got hired full-time. He’s now got an updated WIM file using the Virtual Box as a kind of Virtual Build Lab for both updated, creating and applying the WIM images. That work then allows us to put it onto a WinPE flash drive and apply it as needed for a full-touch manual image of a computer. I’m still holding out hope that this can be improved and  be less manual, less high-touch than in the past. One further refinement along those lines was adding a “drivers path” to the Windows unattend.xml file. That allowed us to robocopy the drivers for a particular machine into a known folder path on the newly imaged machine (no matter which one it was) and it would just suck up all the drivers on the OOBE steps on the first/second reboots after the machine was imaged for the first time. Heady stuff and I have to say once you start tweaking it speeds stuff up a lot and it just works! It never breaks or wrecks the process. So it’s very reliable to make those single changes that take a step out of the (re)imaging process.

    I’m still playing around with these ideas and have trained my replacement on how to use them. Next steps are Windows ADK 8.1, WinPE5 builds and coming up with an image with Office 2013 and Win8.1. I think that will become our next reference standard before long.

  • Fixed on Pages: Long-Term Content on Your Blog

    I’m going to look into this further. I have a home renovation project page, but it’s not well integrated into the rest of the Blog. Might have to restructure/re-factor the blog a bit.

  • How Amazon is building substations, laying fiber and generally doing everything to keep cloud costs down

    Interesting to know all of what goes into Amazon Web Services. They are the 800 lb. Gorilla of cloud computing and they continue to cut prices every day. amazing.

    Derrick Harris's avatarGigaom

    If there’s anyone still left wondering how it is that large cloud providers can keep on rolling out new features and lowering their prices even when no one is complaining about them, Amazon Web Services Vice President and Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton spelled out the answer in one word during a presentation Thursday at the company’s re:Invent conference: Scale.

    Scale is the enabler of everything at AWS. To express the type of scale he’s talking about, Hamilton noted an oft-cited statistic — that AWS adds enough capacity every day to power the entirety of Amazon.com when was it was a $7 billion business. “In fact, it’s way bigger than that,” he added. “It’s way bigger than that every day.”

    Seven days a week, the global cycle of building, testing, shipping, racking and deploying AWS’s computing gear “just keeps cranking,” Hamilton said. AWS now has servers deployed in nine regions across the world…

    View original post 997 more words

  • All-flash IBM V7000 smashes Oracle/Sun ZFS box • The Register

    Some Storage Thingy
    Some Storage Thingy (Photo credit: mootown)

    What would happen if we replaced those 16 disk-based V7000s with all-flash V7000s? Each of the disk-based ones delivered 32,502.7 IOPS. Let’s substitute them with 16 all-flash V7000s, like the one above, and, extrapolate linearly; we would get 1,927,877.4 SPC-1 IOPS – nearly 2 million IOPS. Come on IBM: go for it.

    via All-flash IBM V7000 smashes Oracle/Sun ZFS box • The Register.

    That’s right, IBM is understanding the Flash-based SSD SAN market and is making some benchmark systems to help market its disk arrays. Finally we’re seeing some best case scenarios for these high end throughput monsters. It’s entirely possible to create a 2Million IOPS storage SAN. You just have to assemble the correct components and optimize your storage controllers. What was once a theoretical maximum throughput (1M IOPs) is now achievable without anything more than a purchase order and an account representative from IBM Global Services. It’s not cheap, not by a longshot but your Big Data project or OLAP with Dashboard may just see orders of magnitude increases in speed. It’s all just a matter of money. And probably some tweaking via an IBM consultant as well (touche).

    Granted that IBM doesn’t have this as a shipping product isn’t really the point. On paper what can be achieved by mixing matching enterprise storage appliances and disk arrays and software controllers is beyond what any other company is selling IS the point. There’s a goldmine to be had if anyone outside of a high frequency trading skunkworks just shares a little bit of in-house knowledge product familiarity. No doubt it’s not just the network connections that make things faster it is the IOPs that will out no matter what. Write vs. Read and latency will always trump the fastest access to an updated price in my book. But I don’t work for a high-frequency trading skunkworks either, I’m not privy to the demands made upon those engineers and consultants.  But still we are now in the best, boldest time yet of nearly too much speed on the storage front. Only thing holding us back is the network access times.

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  • 25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web | Ars Technica

    Bill Atkinson—creator of MacPaint—painted in M...
    Bill Atkinson—creator of MacPaint—painted in MacPaint (Photo credit: ✖ Daniel Rehn)

    “I missed the mark with HyperCard,” Atkinson lamented. “I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I’d grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser.

    via 25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web | Ars Technica.

    Bill Atkinson‘s words on HyperCard and what could have been are kind of sad in a way. But Bill is a genius by any measure of Computer Science and programming ability. Without QuickDraw, the Mac would not have been much of a graphical experience for those attempting to write software for the Mac. Bill’s drawing routines took advantage of all the assembly language routines available on the old Motorola 68000 chip and eked out every last bit of performance to make the Mac what it was in the end; Insanely Great.

    I write this in reference also to my experience of learning and working with HyperCard. It acts as the opening parenthesis to my last 16 years working for my current employer. Educational Technology has existed in various forms going all the way back to 1987 when Steve Jobs was attempting to get Universities to buy Macs and create great software to run on those same computers. There was an untapped well of creativity and energy that Higher Education represented and Jobs tried to get the Macintosh computer in any school that would listen.

    The period is long since gone. The idea of educational software, interactive hypermedia, CD-ROMs all gone the way of the web and mobile devices. It’s a whole new world now, and the computer of choice is the mobile phone you pick-up on 2 year contract to some telecom carrier. That’s the reality. So now designers and technologists are having to change to a “mobile first” philosophy and let all other platforms and form factors follow that design philosophy. And it makes sense as desktop computer sales still erode a few percentage points each year. It’s just a matter of time before we reach peak Desktops. It’s likely already happened, we just haven’t accepted it as gospel.

    Every technology is a stepping stone or shoulder to stand on leading to the next stepping stone. Evolutionary steps are the rule of the day. Revolution has passed us by. We’re in for the long slog, putting things into production making them do useful work. Who has time to play and discover when everyone has a pre-conceived notion of the brand device and use it will serve. I want X to do Y, no time to advise or consult to fit and match things based on their essential quality or essence of what they are good at accomplishing. This is the brand and this is how I’m going to use it. That’s what Educational Technology has become these days.

  • My current line of work

    There is no end to the amount of stuff I get asked to do. I like the technical aspects and not so much the other bits. There is a lot of communications and expectation setting. And therein lies the rub. (more…)

  • 2012 in review

    The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 17,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals

    Click here to see the complete report.

  • Attempting to create an autounattend.xml file for work

    Image representing Windows as depicted in Crun...
    Image via CrunchBase

     

    Starting with this website tutorial I’m attempting to create a working config file that will allow me to install new Windows 7 Professional installs without having to interact or click any buttons.

     

    http://sergeyv.com/blog/archive/2009/12/17/unattended-install-of-windows-7.aspx

     

    Seems pretty useful so far as Sergey provides an example autounattend file that I’m using as a template for my own. I particularly like his RunOnce registry additions. This makes it so much more useful than just simply being an answer file to the base OS install. True it is annoying that questions that come up through successive reboots during the specialize pass on a Windows 7 fresh install. But this autounattend file does a whole lot of default presetting behind that  scenes, and that’s what I want when I’m trying create a brand new WIM image for work. I’m going to borrow those most definitely.

     

    I also discovered an interesting sub-section devoted to joining a new computer to a Domain. Ever heard of djoin.exe?

     

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Dd392267.aspx

     

    Very interesting stuff where you can join the computer without first having to login to the domain controller and create a new account in the correct OU (which is what I do currently) and save a little time putting the Computer on the Domain. Sweet. I’m a hafta check this out further and get the syntax down just so… Looks like there’s also a switch to ‘reuse’ an existing account which would be really handy for computers that I rebuild and add back using the same machine name. That would save time too. Looks like it might be Win7/Server2008 specific and may not be available widely where I work. We have not moved our Domains to Server 2008 as far as I know.

     

    djoin /provision /domain to be joined> /machine /savefile blob.txt

     

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd391977(v=WS.10).aspx (What’s new in Active Directory Domain Services in Windows Server 2008 R2: Offline Domain provisioning.

     

    Also you want to be able to specify the path in AD where the computer account is going to be created. That requires knowing the full syntax of the LDAP:// path in AD

     

    http://serverfault.com/questions/22866/how-can-i-determine-my-user-accounts-ou-in-a-windows-domain

     

    There’s also a script you can download and run to get similar info that is Win 2000 era AD compliant: http://www.joeware.net/freetools/tools/adfind/index.htm

     

    Random Thoughts just now: I could create a Generic WIM with a single folder added each time and Appended to the original WIM that included the Windows CAB file for that ‘make/model’ from Dell. Each folder then could have DPInst copied into it and run as a Synchronous command during OOBE pass for each time the WIM is applied with ImageX. Just need to remember which number to use for each model’s set of drivers. But the description field for each of those appended driver setups could be descriptive enough to make it user friendly. Or we could opt just to include the 960 drivers as a base set covering most bases and then provide links to the CAB files over \\fileshare\j\deviceDrivers\ and let DPInst recurse its way down the central store of drivers to do the cleanup phase.

     

    OK, got a good autounattend.xml formulated. Should auto-activate and register the license key no problem-o. Can’t wait to try it out tomorrow when I get home on the test computer I got setup. It’s an Optiplex 960 and I’m going to persist all the Device Drivers after I run sysprep /generalize /shutdown /oobe and capture the WIM file. Got a ton of customizing yet to do on the Admin profile before it gets copied to the Default Profile on the sysprep step. So maybe this time round I’ll get it just right.

     

    One big thing I have to remember is to set IE 8 to pass all logon information for the Trusted Sites Zone within the security settings. If I get that embedded into the thing once and for all I’ll have a halfway decent image that mirrors what we’re using now in Ghost. Next steps once this initial setup from a Win7 setup disk is perfected is to tweak the Administrator’s profile then set copy profile=true when I run Sysprep /generalize /oobe /config:unattend.xml (that config file is another attempt to filter the settings of what gets kept and what is auto-run before the final OOBE phase on the Windows setup). That will be the last step in the process.

     

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  • Apple, Google Just Killed Portable GPS Devices | Autopia | Wired.com

    Note this is a draft of an article I wrote back in June when Apple announced it was going to favor its own Maps app over Google Maps and take G-Maps out of the Apple Store altogether. This blog went on hiatus just 2 weeks after that. And a whirlwind number of staff changes occurred at Apple as a result of the debacle of iOS Maps product. Top people have been let go not the least of which was the heir apparent in some people’s views of Steve Jobs; Scott Forstall. He was not popular, very much a jerk and when asked by Tim Cook to co-sign the mea culpa Apple put out over their embarrassment about the lack of performance and lack of quality of iOS Maps, Scott wouldn’t sign it. So goodbye Scott, hello Google Maps. Somehow Google and Apple are in a period of detente over Maps and Google Maps is now returned to the Apple Store. Who knew so much could happen in 6 months right?

    Garmin told Wired in a statement. “We think that there is a market for smartphone navigation apps, PNDs [Personal Navigation Devices] and in-dash navigation systems as each of these solutions has their own advantages and use case limitations and ultimately it’s up to the consumer to decide what they prefer.

    via Apple, Google Just Killed Portable GPS Devices | Autopia | Wired.com.

    That’s right mapping and navigation are just one more app in a universe of software you can run on your latest generation iPod Touch or iPhone. I suspect that the Maps will only be available on the iPhone as that was a requirement previously placed on the first gen Maps app on iOS. It would be nice if there were a lower threshold entry point for participation in the Apple Maps app universe.

    But I do hear one or two criticisms regarding Apple’s attempt to go its own way. Google’s technology and data set lead (you know all those cars driving around and photographing?) Apple has to buy that data from others, it isn’t going to start from scratch and attempt to re-create Google’s Street View data set. Which means it won’t be something Maps has as a feature probably for quite some time. Android’s own Google Maps app includes turn-by-turn navigation AND Street view built right in. It’s just there. How cool is that? You get the same experience on the mobile device as the one you get working in a web browser on a desktop computer.

    In this battle between Google and Apple the pure play personal navigation device (PND) manufacturers are losing share. I glibly suggested in a twee yesterday that Garmin needs to partner up with Apple and help out with its POI and map datasets so that potentially both can benefit. It would be cool if a partnership could be struck that allowed Apple to have feature that didn’t necessarily steal market share from the PNDs, but could somehow raise all boats equally. Maybe a partnership to create a Street View-like add-on for everyone’s mapping datasets would be a good start. That would help level the playing field between Google vs. the rest of the world.

  • End of the hiatus

    I am now at a point in my daily work where I can begin posting to my blog once again. It’s not so much that I’M catching up, but more like I don’t care as much about falling behind. Look forward to more Desktop related posts as that is now my fulltime responsibility there where I work.

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