Deploy ODBC Settings via Group Policy
KB ID 0000805 Problem I’ve briefly mentioned this before when I wrote about Group Policy Preferences so when I had to do this on-site this week, I jumped straight into the group policy management console, and found that because my ODBC connection was using SQL authentication (with the SQL sa account), this would NOT WORK, (it only works with Windows authentication and even then it needs a tweak). If you are using SQL...
WDS – “The Network Path was not found” when adding an Unattend file
KB ID 0000487 Problem Saw this last week, while trying to use an unattended file for the roll out of some machines with WDS. Every time you try and enter a value you get “The network path was not found” error, no combination of file path or UNC path seems to cure the problem. Solution This is a “work around” not a fix, essentially it will not accept any value you put into the path without throwing and error. If...
WDS – Unattended file – Removing /Formatting Drive Partitions
KB ID 0000490 Problem Over the last couple of years I’ve done a lot of imaging of School PC’s I don’t know why but they come with a myriad of different drive and partition configurations. Even big vendors like HP and Dell ship their machines with recovery partitions these days. If you are imaging with WDS this can cause a problem so what I usually want to do is remove all the partitions, create one big one that...
WDS – Unattended file – Joining a Domain Automatically
KB ID 0000494 Problem During a large rollout the more things you can automate the better, before you continue though be aware of one thing… You can only automatically join a client to a domain if it has an auto generated random machine name!* *Note: This is not 100% true, if you pre-stage the computer objects into Active Directory with the GUID of the machine (you can see this on the screen at pXe boot time, or get it from the...
Windows Deployment Services – Asks for Locale and Keyboard
KB ID 0000734 Problem Seen when deploying images with WDS, even though you have specified language, and keyboard settings in your answerfile. The system still asks you to set the language and keyboard options. For a couple of machines you might put up with this, but for a few thousand machines it can get quite annoying! Solution There is a reason it’s doing this, and it’s because the next thing it asks you to do is...