Jake

I shall take a look, ta.

As a matter of interest are there any parts of the sccm install process you have not been able to powershell? I ask as around this time last year I was in a position of knowing I needed to rebuild my entire domain as we were going through a company rename but didnt yet have the new name. Ended up building a few dozen domain environments through powershell+powercli (vmware environment) including a lot of the sccm stuff so that once i did have the name+domain name i was ready to get going pretty quickly. I accept I am no powershell expert but as it took me a long time to put together if there are any smaller parts of interest I'm happy to share them, log of entire build attached. I made a lot of sacrifices in the scripts for the fact these scripts were all running remotely, e.g. i installed SQL as a scheduled task. Names/ip addresses tweaked for semi-anonymity. CleanedUpNames.Build.txt

Thank you Garett, really appreciated to have someone just double check things. All of the servers will be/are VMs - microsoft licensing in schools at least in Uk, is incredibly cheap - physical tin is where we struggle a little more. A SAN upgrade will not happen for a while yet but it does ok. Our current/old sccm environment is all on a single VM so I am used to the relatively slow performance - still, it is ok for us - even then I think a ram uprade here would make a significant difference. Again, thank you for the time you have taken to reply.

Good morning, Having read some conflicting info recently I am hoping someone can please sanity check my SCCM deployment plans... I have been using SCCM 2012 (/R2) since more or less release, thanks to windows-noob guides and we are now heavily reliant on it as a platform for OSD, SUS and application deployment. I am at a school of approx 900 devices and 1600 users in the process of migrating computers, groups, users and mailboxes to a new domain along with a few other schools that form an academy trust. Existing SCCM 2012 environment is a single site, single distribution point, everything connected by 1gbit. New environment will span 4 schools and potentially leverage azure in the future interconnected by a shared 100mbit link that may well burst up to close to 100mbit, but it is not expected that we should saturate this link. The current plan for new domain is a single sccm 2012 r2 site with locally installed SQL 2012 SP2, that may well end up in azure, and a distribution point in each school all with the same site code. school1 has ~900 devices and 1600 users school2 has ~1000 devices and 1800 users school3 has ~200 devices and 500 users school4 has ~300 devices and 600 users but will grow considerably due to being new build. Expectations are that we will not exceed even 5000 devices in the next few years (by which point I'm sure we will be considering the next SCCM offering and potentially a new design). Licensing of many products including Microsoft Windows/Office etc will be done as a whole over the entire environment, many other products will be specific to an individual school e.g. Adobe CS6. Boundaries/Boundary Groups have been defined by AD Site. Distribution Points and Distribution Point Groups have been configured and associated with some relevant collections - along with having configured a number of collections obviously. It is currently built to the point of being able to deploy an OS, deploy Office and deploy appropriate Windows/Office updates via WSUS and only a single school with a distribution point so far, and none deployed to the other schools. Have also confirmed that the OS is coming from that local DP and not from the main site DP (having lost a lot of time and hair screaming at my monitor I discovered I had a tick in 'Use this boundary group for site assignment' on main site GRR). My question is - is this how you would set it up? Would you have a primary site/site code for each school in the environment? I would prefer not to have to rip everything out and start fresh, but will if recommended and certainly don't object to ripping out/changing the way my local DP server is setup etc. Your comments, suggestions and advice is very much appreciated. Thank you

Thank you, that is really dissapointing though . Any recommendations on the practice of updating applications? is supercedence THE way to do it? And, if so, is it necessary to all software versions within SCCM?

I would personally use group policy preferences for individual file/folder deletions rather than SCCM. I don't think the %USERNAME% variable is going to help you?

Good morning, I would appreciate if someone could advise on a couple of questions, please - I have been searching for a while. One of the applications I am deploying has several parts to it and I am trying to understand how best to manage this applications deployment. The application is Promethean ActiveInspire and as part of the installation there are the following MSIs that need to be installed; ActivDriver x64.msi, ActivDriver x86.msi, ActivInspire.msi, ActivInspireCoreRes.msi, ActivInspireHelp.msi and ActivInspireHWRRes.msi So, is it necessary to Create Application for each MSI and then deploy each application part to my collection(s) or can I send all parts in one go as a single Application? I tried to add them as additional Deployment Types, but I don't think this is right, and only the Priority 1 MSI appears to be installed and the wording on the Deployment Types pane suggests to me this is only to give the administrator an option to deploy a single application but offer multiple deployment types dependent on platform or perhaps other requirements. So, assuming my understanding above is correct, is there a more tidy way to deploy an application that has multiple parts to it without going down the route of some ugly scripts? Secondly, when updating applications, is it necessary to use the supersedence option - and if so, is it necessary to keep each revision of a piece of software? There is a suggestion here of using batch scripts to call installers/uninstallers but this doesn't seem especially elegant, especially with the application above with multiple parts. Using SCCM 2012 R2 CU1 on Windows Server 2008 R2 SCCM in my environment deploys Windows Updates and updates for Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash Player via SCUP. I know there are 3rd parties that offer SCUP catalogs for updating regularly updated applications e.g. Java etc but my laughable budgets sadly won't stretch that far. Many thanks Jake

Thanks for the reply Brian, Yes, single DP So the backup/restore doesn't care that it is being restored back to a server with a different name - and with different paths?

Good morning, Been a while since I was on this forum! Working in a large academy, part of a larger trust, we will shortly need to ensure our server names conform with our academy trust naming scheme. I am not looking to just rename our existing SCCM2012 server as I'm sure it would either a) flat out be not supported or break a ton of things and be forever troubleshooting it forever after. So, I am wondering if anyone could please advise on any best practices, caveats, gotchas etc for creating a new SCCM server in the same site code and migrating everything across? Our current server is quite heavily utilised, all OS deployments, Windows Updates (WSUS) deployments, application/package deployments come from this one server and our site has approx 1000 devices. Currently the server is Windows Server 2008R2, new server will be Windows Server 2012 R2, currently on SCCM 2012 R2, new server would be SCCM 2012 R2, SQL is installed on the same server and used exclusively by SCCM. Many thanks Jake

Sorry I have been slow to reply; Are you sure that you have followed the instructions completely? Things to check; [in dhcp\server options] Tick option 067 and enter the name of the bootfile, in ghosts case, its "boot\ghost.ldr". More on this later. did you restart dhcp? ghost.dsk and ghost.ldr are both in the [path to ghost]\boot folder? When you merged the .reg file you definitely had the right path to your ghost directory? Please confirm by checking HKLM\System\Current Control Set\Services\TFTPD\Parameters does the path here point to your ghost folder? I'm assuming the RIS option showed up in the boot wizard and you had no errors when building the bootable image? Admittedly I have never tried this with grub4dos, only with msdos (or pcdos).. Could you perhaps try with pcdos/msdos to rule out that difference?

Hi Georgeg, I was doing something similar at my previous employment, could you enable logging on the tftpd and post that here? If that particular tftpd doesn't have logging, if you could please try a different tftpd I have skimmed through the edugeek article, is it supposed to begin ghosting? Or is it just expected to boot up in to the ghost client and wait for you to connect to a session?