Tuesday, September 23, 2014

ConfigMgr Cumulative Updates

Every now and then Microsoft releases Cumulative Updates. Twitter explodes on the new release, like everyone is going to deploy the update without a doubt.

However: when I read the Microsoft support article I come across the following lines:

A supported update is available from Microsoft Support. However, this update is intended to correct only the problems that are described in this article. Apply this update only to systems that are experiencing the problems described in this article. This update might receive additional testing. Therefore, if you are not severely affected by these problems, we recommend that you wait for the next service pack that contains this update.

So, I found that non of these apply to my customer(s). Should I apply the update anyway, or wait for the Service Pack to come?

The only things I see here are the additional testing and administrative burden that are involved applying the CU.

So what is your advice or way to go? Please leave your comments, just a line will do, I'm curious.

Thx!

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

WIM error deploying captured OEM image

Recently I have been struggling to capture a Thin Client (Windows Embedded Standard 8) image from a Dell Wyse device, specifically the D90D8 model.

These where some of the errors in the SMSTS.log:

Installation of image 1 in package P01000xx failed to complete. Permissions on the requested may  be configured incorrectly. Access is denied. (Error: 80070005; Source: Windows)

Failed to run the action: Apply Operating System Image. Permissions on the requested may be configured incorrectly. Access is denied. (Error: 800070005; Source: Windows)

WIM error:C:\_SMSTaskSequence\TSEnv.dat. Permissions on the requested may be
 configured incorrectly. Access is denied. (Error: 800070005; Source: Windows) Unable to apply (0x80070005)

Dell delivered the device preinstalled using an OEM license. Because of that we chose to capture the image to be able to deploy through ConfigMgr. Installing a non OEM licensed Windows Embedded version would raise the costs, and also extra effort by finding the right drivers.
Dell secures it's images thoroughly using certificates and secure boot. So when I prepared the image for capture using USB media and the Thin Client rebooted, it was unable to find the boot device. Apparently the capture preparation changed some settings which interfere with Dell's security policies. So eventually I prepared a PXE boot and did the capture manually using imagex, very easy and succesfull.

However, since the preparation didn't finish some leftovers stayed behind on the Thin Client and where captured in the image. This caused issues when deploying the WIM image. For example the folders C:\_SMSTaskSequence, C:\SMSTS still existed. Once I removed these from the image

  • dism /mount-wim /wimfile:"D:\Captured Image.wim" /index:1 /mountdir:D:\Mount
  • Removed leftover folders
  • dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:D:\Mount /commit
  • Updated DP's
Now I am good to go and the errors went away. Deploying like crazy!!