Mick's IT Blog

MARCH 16, 2022

Recently, we needed a report of the last boot time of all servers. I wrote this PowerShell script that queries AD for a list of all windows servers and then does a WMI query on each server for the LastBootUpTime. It then calculates the number of days and writes this to an object with the computer name and the number of days since the last reboot. It will write this info to a CSV file.

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Report Windows System 208

Mick's IT Blog

MARCH 7, 2022

I recently had to rebuild the Configuration Manager server. As I was running the prerequisite tool, it showed it could not communicate with the SQL server that is separate from the Configuration Manager Server. The issue ended up being ports needed to be opened up. This PowerShell script will configure the correct ports. It also adds to the description as to what services the port is opened up for in Configuration Manager.

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Firewall Groups Web Services Tools 153

Mick's IT Blog

DECEMBER 20, 2021

I wanted to install Winget via PowerShell in an automated process. The first thing I did was to go to the Winget GitHub site and select the latest version of the Windows Package Manager. Under the latest version page, I clicked on the file with the extension of msixbundle and downloaded it to my machine. Now that it is on your machine, you can automate the installation with a PowerShell one-liner script where the PS1 file resides in the same directory as the Winget installer.

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Windows 221

Mick's IT Blog

NOVEMBER 19, 2021

This PowerShell tool queries AD for a list of machines in the specified administrative admin groups. The list is specified by modifying the script with the groups to be queried. The following example shows how to add groups to the query. When there are multiple groups, they can be divided off by using the pipe character between each group. Where-Object {$_.MemberOf -match 'Admins|Domain Admins|System Admins|'} There is the parameter called $Days.

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Tools Report Groups Examples 151

Mick's IT Blog

JANUARY 22, 2021

I was in the process of pushing out the Microsoft Windows 10 20H2 upgrade when I had 23 systems that errored out. They reported the error shown below. After looking at the logs and at Software Center on the target machine, I found the target machine was not seeing the deployment under Operating Systems. The fix was to reinstall the client on the target machine.

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Operating Systems Windows Software Software 190

Mick's IT Blog

JANUARY 11, 2021

It is the beginning of 2021 and my first project for the new year is upgrading all systems to Windows 10 20H2. At the end of the upgrades comes the cleanup and there is no clean way to do this for system admins. Cleanmgr.exe is now deprecated as of Windows 10 2004. There is not a PowerShell option for controlling storage sense. The next option is to delete the folder.

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Windows System Storage Security 261

Mick's IT Blog

SEPTEMBER 25, 2020

One of my recent projects is to convert our remaining legacy systems from BIOS to UEFI. While setting up the task sequence, I needed to be able to test the system to make sure it was not already UEFI so the task sequence would end if it was. The PowerShell script reads the setupact.log file and extracts if it is configured as BIOS or UEFI. I have included an unknown message in the event the log file does not exist or is inaccessible, which is what I encountered on one machine.

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System 130

Mick's IT Blog

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

As part of the suite of security tools I am writing, this will query the configuration manager SQL database for a list of machines that are not Bitlocker encrypted. There are reports in the configuration manager for this, but not everyone in my organization has access to the configuration manager console, and we wanted a detailed report sent out on a regular basis so that it is in their mailbox with high importance, which is also not available through ConfigMgr.

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Report Hardware Tools Security 112

Mick's IT Blog

SEPTEMBER 15, 2020

In the imaging process I devised, most of the Windows 10 Built-In apps, such as mail and maps, are removed. My company uses the SAC edition of Windows 10 enterprise. This requires us to perform an in-place upgrade every 6 months. In order to prevent the built-in apps from reappearing, you can add specific registry keys that permanently deprovision the apps.

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Windows Applications Enterprise Enterprise 152

Mick's IT Blog

SEPTEMBER 9, 2020

Normally, windows updates are pushed to machines using Configuration Manager in an enterprise environment. There are occasions though when they must manually be pushed, such as when a system continues to fail via ConfigMgr and troubleshooting is required. The first tool I use is the PSWindowsUpdate PowerShell module. This allows me to remotely push updates via PowerShell and PSEXEC , in which I can watch the results.

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Windows Enterprise Enterprise Tools 246

Mick's IT Blog

AUGUST 28, 2020

This tool is designed to report if a user profile has been logged into a defined number of machines or greater over a specified period of time. The purpose of the tool is to: Detect a cybercriminal who may have gotten one user credential and is now using it to probe machines across the domain Detect a disgruntled employee who may be logging into multiple machines for destructive reasons The tool works by querying the ConfigMgr SQL server for a list of machines users have logged into.

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Report Tools Groups Microsoft 170

Mick's IT Blog

AUGUST 27, 2020

If you use PowerShell with Configuration Manager, you likely know that there are two PowerShell modules named ConfigurationManager.psd1. One is located at %PROGRAMFILES%Microsoft Configuration ManagerAdminConsolebin and the other one is located at %PROGRAMFILES%Microsoft Configuration ManagerAdminConsolebinConfigurationManager. If you are trying to figure out which one to use, the %PROGRAMFILES%Microsoft Configuration ManagerAdminConsolebin is the most logical one.

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Microsoft 197

Mick's IT Blog

JUNE 12, 2020

This script will clean up the legacy items left over after a distribution point has been deleted in the configuration manager console. This is sometimes necessary if the same server is going to be used to re-push the distribution point back down to it. The script will not proceed if the DP registry keys are not present so that it can find where the distribution point directory exists to be deleted.

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Mick's IT Blog

MAY 19, 2020

This script will connect to the Zerto server and retrieve a list of systems that Zerto is not backing up. The script has been written so that it can function in the Azure Automation or Orchestrator environment. It can also be used as a scheduled task or executed manually. It excludes desktop operating systems. You will need to install both the activedirectory and zertoapiwrapper modules before using this script.

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System Operating Systems Windows Enterprise 207

Mick's IT Blog

MAY 12, 2020

During the COVID19 pandemic, one of my projects has been to build a new configuration manager server at our newer production site for optimal performance. During this process, we needed to be able to differentiate what servers were on our disaster recovery VMWare server, and what servers were on the production VMWare server. We quickly learned that some of the virtual servers could not be differentiated.

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Vmware Virtualization System Disaster Recovery 173

Mick's IT Blog

MAY 5, 2020

We have a new datacenter and the configuration manager server needed to be moved to that location. The setup of Configuration Manager is not too difficult. I did though run into several gotchas along the way. The first one was a warning that read 'configuration for SQL server memory usage'. I needed at least 8 GB of RAM allocated to the SQL database.

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Virtualization Microsoft Applications Tools 169

Mick's IT Blog

APRIL 13, 2020

I just started building a completely new configuration manager server. While setting it up, I remembered that I wished in the past that I had all of the original default client settings because some did get changed. If you have ever made changes directly to the default client settings and cannot remember what the original settings were, then here is a screenshot of each section.

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Software Software Hardware Policies 199

Mick's IT Blog

OCTOBER 30, 2019

I have wrestled with the issue of managing mandatory reboots for quite a while. Back before laptops were introduced into the environment, we used an SCCM package that triggered a reboot once a week. Today, with the majority of systems being laptops and tablets, it is not so easy to implement a reboot. The problem came when the package ran, and a system was offline.

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Advertising Policies System Report 127

Mick's IT Blog

OCTOBER 3, 2019

Recently, I have begun setting up new front and back-office security runbooks in Microsoft Orchestrator. These runbooks needed to use PowerShell for getting data from the SCCM server. The SCCM console is not installed on the Orchestrator server, so PowerShell required to be able to connect directly to it. The following script will import the SCCM PowerShell module, connect to the SCCM server, and then disconnect.

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System Programming Microsoft Security 130

Mick's IT Blog

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

I have used the Dell Command | Update in the build for quite some time for managing the drivers on systems because it makes it a hand-off approach with little setup and reliable updates direct from Dell. The one thing I have wanted to be able to rerun this task several times without having to have duplicate tasks in the task sequence. Sometimes there are multiple reboots required because not all drivers can be installed at the same time.

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Dell System Microsoft Applications 152

Mick's IT Blog

SEPTEMBER 5, 2019

While writing a new PowerShell script for SCCM, I needed to be able to keep track of how many times a system had rebooted when using the SMSTSRebootRequested. The apparent solution, at least what I initially thought, was to create a TS variable and increment it upon each reboot. It ended up never ceasing the reboot process, and the task reran indefinitely.

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System 85

Mick's IT Blog

AUGUST 2, 2019

Recently, I have been working on updating several scripts I have written for the build process. One big thing I have wanted is for the script to be able to initiate a reboot without the build process becoming corrupt. An additional functionality I have wanted to implement is to be able to restart the task sequence at the same point it left off before the reboot.

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How To Windows Research 125

Mick's IT Blog

JULY 18, 2019

I wrote an article about three years ago on conditional task sequence reboots. It used the built-in reboot task sequence that was initiated only if any of the three conditions were met. The problem was a fourth condition that could not be tested for because a WMI query is the only way to test and MDT conditions do not incorporate WMI. Recently, I revisited this, and it occurred to me how to incorporate the WMI query after going through the ZTIWindowsUpdate.wsf and seeing how it initiated reboots

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Windows System How To 126

Mick's IT Blog

JUNE 6, 2019

Recently, we decided to change the power scheme on machines during the build. This can be quickly done using the powercfg.exe, but I wanted to be sure it always set correctly. Plus, the GUID associated with a power scheme can be different, so I wanted to specify the power scheme by the name. This PowerShell one-liner will set the power scheme on a machine to the scheme defined in the variable $Setting.

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Mick's IT Blog

APRIL 15, 2019

If you have been wanting to wake your Dell systems up from sleep, hibernate, or shutdown states, this is how you do it. Starting out with this article from Dell, I got the list of things needed to set up the system for WOL. There are three areas that have to be configured on Dell systems, at least for the systems we have which range from the Optiplex 990 to the Latitude 7490.

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LAN Dell System Energy 148

Mick's IT Blog

APRIL 11, 2019

In my list of recent security projects, I needed to ensure certain applications are present on systems by using SCCM application deployment. One of those applications was Dell Command | Configure. The issue with this application is the Dell Command | Update will update the application which in turn would register it as not installed to SCCM, thereby kicking off the installation again.

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Applications Dell Programming Examples 109

Mick's IT Blog

FEBRUARY 15, 2019

Recently, we ran into the issue of users replacing their keyboard and mouse with Bluetooth devices. What happened was they would lose connectivity and the error below would appear in the event viewer logs. While researching the issue, we found that the user could open up the laptop that was docked and get connectivity back by hitting any key. The culprit was the Power Management setting of the Bluetooth device.

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Research 100

Mick's IT Blog

FEBRUARY 4, 2019

When our build team builds new machines for users, we provide a convenience to the user of letting them know what their default printer is. I wrote this script that will parse through all user profiles in HKU to find the default printer of each profile. It will then write the results to the screen if the script is manually executed, while also writing to the DefaultPrinter.CSV file located at the default directory of each user profile.

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Report Company 81

Mick's IT Blog

FEBRUARY 1, 2019

Here is a PowerShell one-line installer for Mozilla Firefox. This allows you to download the latest version of Mozilla Firefox during the build process without having to maintain the package each time. The URI used in this is for the 64-bit version of Firefox. If you need a different version, you will need to locate the download URI and copy and paste it in the one-liner thereby changing the value of $URI.

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Mick's IT Blog

JANUARY 23, 2019

While working on a series of one-liners for configuring the NIC on machines, I created this needed to makes changes to the power management settings of the NIC. This is something that will be implemented in the build, so I also wanted to make the script into a one-liner so the code itself can reside within the task sequence. This one-liner can check/uncheck the boxes within the Power Management tab of the network adapter.

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Windows Network Report 197

Mick's IT Blog

JANUARY 9, 2019

In Windows 10 1809, I needed to enable some RSAT features that are now included in the OS. I figured this would be a good time to go from using a script to using one-liners for the build process. Mike Robbins's blog was a good start to developing this one-liner. This allows for you to manage the code within the task sequence, thereby negating the issue of storing a script and the possibility of the script accidentally being deleted.

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Windows Microsoft Report System 164

Mick's IT Blog

OCTOBER 24, 2018

If you have to track the login times for a specific user, this tool will generate a report for you that scans the event viewer logs for ID 4624. The tool parses each event and retrieves the user name, securityID, type of logon, computer name, and time stamp. It formats the output and writes it to a centralized CSV file in the event this tool is deployed to multiple machines at once.

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Report Tools Security System 101

Mick's IT Blog

OCTOBER 5, 2018

We have started the Windows 10 upgrades and part of this process is installing applications for users that are not included in the standard build. One option is to use the SCCM Resource Explorer for a list of apps installed. The problem with that is it is a blanket report. It shows everything and all we were wanting is a report of the additional apps installed after a build.

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Applications Report Dell Authentication 202

Mick's IT Blog

AUGUST 22, 2018

If you have the SLShare variable defined in MDT to write logs to the specified UNC path and the SLShareDynamicLogging defined to write to the same path including the %ComputerName%, you have probably run into the issue of the logs being enormous. This is since each time a system is reimaged with the same computer name, the new logs are appended to the old logs, and they do get big.

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System 25

Mick's IT Blog

AUGUST 8, 2018

Dell Command | Configure can be of great use in the WinPE environment. It allows you to configure and/or query the BIOS before an operating system is laid down. This is easy to do. The first thing is to determine the architecture of the WinPE environment. This will determine which Dell Command | Configure to use. If you use a 64-bit machine, you will have two folders under %PROGRAMFILES(X86)%DellCommand Configure.

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Dell .Net Operating Systems Architecture 97

Mick's IT Blog

JULY 19, 2018

While rewriting a PowerShell automation script to move machines in Active Directory, I had been trying to pass the MachineObjectOU task sequence variable to the PowerShell script within the command line task sequence. It constantly failed. I finally put in a cmd.exe task sequence to pause the build and allow me to interact directly with the task sequence.

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Mick's IT Blog

JULY 11, 2018

Instead of wanting to keep up with the latest Google Chrome installers, I wanted to create a one-liner that can download Chrome from the Google URI and then silently install it in the reference image build process. This one-liner does just that. It will download the latest Chrome version and install it. This means you no longer have to take time keeping up with the latest installer and the code is compacted down to a one-liner so it is only in the task sequence.

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Google 26