The Realm of the Verbal Processor

Jarvis's Ramblings

Comments vs Contact Form

Over the last week I have had three people email me questions via the Contact Form on my blog with questions about past posts. This was instead of leaving a comment on the actual post on the blog. The last three posts that I have put up are answers to those three emails. I prefer to answer it here so that my responses can benefit more people than just the person asking the question.

If you have a question about something I have written, you can feel free to ask via either the contact form or by leaving a comment. I will try to respond in a timely manner.

October 28, 2009 Posted by | Misc | Leave a comment

PowerShell Script – Loop

Rick emailed me asking the following question about the PowerShell script I wrote last year for adding a domain user to the local admin group on a computer.

How would I loop thru the script for multiple machines ? i.e how to add an account to the local admin groups to a list of systems in a csv

Short answer is you need to look using two PowerShell cmdlets in conjunction. They are:

  • Import-CSV
  • ForEach-Object

You can read about them and a bit about how to use them here, and here. Additionally, I would refer anyone with scripting questions to check out the Scripting Guys blog…it is fantastic.

Hope that helps.

October 28, 2009 Posted by | scripting | Leave a comment

Office 2007 Install Issue

Erik sent the following question re: a special issue with installing Office 2007.

We are in the process of trying to push out office 2007 w/SP2 w/o Access and Publisher and for it to uninstall Outlook 2003, but leave everything else and for it to do it unattended and silent. Now I did create the .MSP file which does this and it works great, but before our company decided to do this in an organized way, they were giving Excel 2007 out for people to try or people don’t have SP2 for Office 2007. Now I have tried everything to create an SMS package (SMS 2003) that will work, but if I just send out the package with the .MSP file it prompts people to interact with it if they already have anything part of Office 2007 on their computer. Now we created a package in sms that will uninstall office 2007, and it’s linked to another package in sms to reinstall office 2007, but it wants a restart on the computer before it will reinstall office 2007. Now if you guys know a way that will work without uninstalling office 2007 first that great too. I’ll take an ideals at this moment.

You do have an interesting problem. Because your company chose to give out part of Office 2007 before the full deployment was packaged and prepared, you will likely have some careful steps to take for those computers.

One way to handle that would be to create a collection to locate the users that have Excel 2007 already installed. From your description, it sounds like those are the only ones that won’t install silently at this point. You may need to communicate with those users to prepare them that a reboot will be required as part of this install. If you send this as a non-mandatory advertisement, they can choose when to do the installation at a time when a reboot won’t affect them as much. I would tell them to just plan to run it when they leave for lunch.

Without building out a similar scenario in my demo environment to test it, I don’t know offhand of a way to do this without uninstalling Excel first. I’m actually a bit surprised that the installation that you made silent still asked for user input. Did you follow my instructions in this post?

October 28, 2009 Posted by | ConfigMgr | 12 Comments

VBS for Adding User to Local Admin Group

Scott sent me this question via the contact form on my blog:

I saw a post you made about using PowerShell to add a domain user to a local administrator group during a task sequence (https://verbalprocessor.com/2008/04/08/add-domain-user-to-local-administrators-group/).  I am trying to do the same thing, but don’t necessarily want to incorporate PowerShell at this time.  I was hoping to use MDT and the Administrators1 task sequence variable, but this doesn’t seem to work.  I have a vbscript that works when run manually, but it can’t connect to the domain to get the user account object when executed via the task sequence.  I’ve tried a few different methods to run under a certain service account, but unless that account is an admin, it doesn’t seem to work.  You had indicated that you have a VBscript that was doing this successfully.  Can I by any chance get a copy of that script?  If you have any other suggestions for me, I would welcome that as well.  I look forward to hearing from you.  Thank you!

I think Scott may have misunderstood what I did in that post. In the post that Scott references I wrote a PowerShell script for running manually after the task sequence is finished to add a domain user to the local admin group of a remote machine. In that post I actually mentioned that I had trouble getting it to work with VBS…even though I was using a Scripting Guys post to try to build the VBS version. I can’t locate the particular Scripting Guys article that I was looking at, but there are several posts related to this from community members at this link.

I did have a VBS that would do this as part of a task sequence that I used at a client earlier this year, however for some reason it stopped working in my demo environment…and I don’t know why. So unfortunately, I don’t have a working VBscript for this that I can share.

October 28, 2009 Posted by | scripting | 1 Comment

SQL Server Version Numbers

This morning I have been building out a new ConfigMgr demo environment on my laptop based on Server 2008 R2. I had already installed SQL 2008, but couldn’t remember if I had installed SP1 for SQL 2008 or not. I looked at the version number, but then had to go to Microsoft to find out what the version number equated to in terms of SP level. For future reference to myself and others, here is a concise list of SQL Server version numbers and the corresponding friendly name. This will be useful if you already know the version number. If you need to know how to get the version number from you SQL server, refer to this page (which is where this list of numbers came from). That page lists the SQL queries for each version to perform to obtain the version number.

SQL Version Version Number
SQL Server 2008 RTM 2007.100.1600.0
SQL Server 2008 SP1 2007.100.2531.0
SQL Server 2005 RTM 2005.90.1399
SQL Server 2005 SP1 2005.90.2047
SQL Server 2005 SP2 2005.90.3042
SQL Server 2005 SP3 2005.90.4035
SQL Server 2000 RTM 2000.80.194.0
SQL Server 2000 SP1 2000.80.384.0
SQL Server 2000 SP2 2000.80.534.0
SQL Server 2000 SP3 2000.80.760.0
SQL Server 2000 SP3a 2000.80.760.0
SQL Server 2000 SP4 2000.8.00.2039
SQL Server 7.0 RTM 7.00.623
SQL Server 7.0 SP1 7.00.699
SQL Server 7.0 SP2 7.00.842
SQL Server 7.0 SP3 7.00.961
SQL Server 7.0 SP4 7.00.1063
SQL Server 6.5 RTM 6.50.201
SQL Server 6.5 SP1 6.50.213
SQL Server 6.5 SP2 6.50.240
SQL Server 6.5 SP3 6.50.258
SQL Server 6.5 SP4 6.50.281
SQL Server 6.5 SP5 6.50.415
SQL Server 6.5 SP5a 6.50.416
SQL Server 6.5 SP5a Update 6.50.479

October 28, 2009 Posted by | ConfigMgr | Leave a comment

   

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