Another day at the office.. Thanks to our friends who wrote the NotPetya worm, I received an email from our monitoring vendor to run reports to see if our machines are up-to-date on their patching. Unfortunately their reporting tool doesn’t properly distinguish between Windows Server 2008 and Windows 2008 R2, as well as Windows 2012 and Windows 2012 R2. Long story short, I had to create 4 separate reports, telling me if I had or had not installed the proper KB item on each machine.

New year, new chances! First of all, I’d like to wish everyone visiting my page a happy 2017 🙂 I hope everyone had a blast and is eager to learn some more in the new year. As for myself, just before the year had ended, so did my previous assignment. Luckily a new assignment was already in the works and I literally went to job A on Tuesday and job B on Wednesday.

Ever have a Task Sequence in MDT which you customized and configured to use a specific driver profile, then having to create a second one just for another model and you have to copy everything over? Well, I did and didn’t like it. So according to Johan Arwidmark [if you’re into MDT and don’t already know this guy, get to know him!], this is possible in various ways. Now while I used his approach, I didn’t like the fact that it wasn’t easily re-usable and I still had to provide various data myself.

In case you’re using Microsoft’s awesome Microsoft Deployment Toolkit [MDT] solution, there might be a thing you don’t often do, but can take up a while of your time and can have quite some impact if you forget a few steps.. What I’m talking about is updating/regenerating your MDT Boot Images and replacing them within Windows Deployment Services [WDS]. Of course such a thing is ideally done through PowerShell as it automates and thus limits the amount of human errors possible.

Today I was playing around on some machines on which I noticed the Power Plans were set incorrect, Balanced on a server :'( Now of course I can do this manually, or I can use PowerShell instead! Tools not scripts Since I want to use this more often and want to create my own “toolbelt” [aka module with common tools], I’ve decided to make the solution as advanced functions, not just scripts.

A quick post this time about something that might be helpful for others, something that saves me from typing too much 🙂 I’ve noticed over the last week that I’ve been doing various remoting commands through Invoke-Command to the same machines, which require additional credentials to access. Why re-type something when you can automate it 🙂 Before I used to have to do the following: 1 2 3 4 5 $SCCMServers = 'CM01.