Out of Office Hours

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  • Detecting when you are in OOBE

    People have asked in the past what the best way to detect when you are using Windows Autopilot to deploy a device, so that some apps and potentially even settings are deferred until a later point in time. When you boil this down, it’s a little more general than that. All you really need to…

  • User interaction in OOBE: Challenge accepted

    When you are going through the OOBE process in Windows 11*, have you ever noticed that anything executing that displays a UI can’t be seen? A good example is the task sequence progress dialog that you would expect to see related to my previous post. You can tell that it is there by using Alt-Tab,…

  • Run an SCCM task sequence during Autopilot HAADJ

    My previous post on this topic covered how to do this with Azure AD Join. In that scenario, getting the Configuration Manager client installed and functioning is easier to do since it supports using an Azure AD user token for authentication. The same thing doesn’t work for Hybrid Azure AD Join (even though there should…

  • Dissecting an SCCM bulk registration token

    When looking at feasible processes for installing the Configuration Manager client using the “Co-management settings” feature in Intune with Hybrid Azure AD Join, bulk registration tokens appeared to be the best option. (I haven’t yet given up on PKI certificates, but there are challenges with that.) But since I hadn’t used these before, I figured…

  • Compact a Hyper-V VHDX from a Linux VM

    It’s easy enough to compact a VHDX file attached to a Windows VM: Just shut down the VM, then edit the disk and specify “Compact” as the action: But for Linux VMs, Hyper-V doesn’t understand the disk contents as well (at all?) so you have to add an extra step. From a command prompt (sudo…

  • Run an SCCM task sequence during Autopilot

    When I first heard about Windows Autopilot (before it was even called Windows Autopilot), the first thing I thought (knowing how limited MDM-delivered configuration could be) was “how can I run an SCCM task sequence during a Windows Autopilot provisioning process.” So I tried it, and failed miserably. It was just too messy to do,…

  • Creating a wildcard cert on Windows using LetsEncrypt

    While in theory you can easily generate internal certificates for internet-based usage, as long as you deploy your CA’s trusted root certificate, there are times (e.g. Windows Autopilot + AAD Join + Co-Management Settings + CMG) when that’s just not practical. But since you can easily get free certificates these days, it’s worth some effort…

  • Windows Autopilot testing with VMs

    We all test with virtual machines whenever possible, right? I know I always have, and for expediency I typically went through this process: That gets the VM into a reusable state. You can then go through the device registration process: At this point, you should be able to walk through OOBE. It will prompt to…

  • 2023 might be Windows 11’s year after all

    Back in early 2023, I argued in a blog post that 2023 would be a good year to evaluate Windows 11 so that you could start deploying it with the release of Windows 11 23H2 around October of this year. That made the assumption that Windows 11 23H2 would be another full feature upgrade (in-place…

  • What is the Windows Server 2022 Datacenter Azure Edition, and how does it do Azure AD Join?

    Microsoft started talking about an Azure-specific version of Windows Server 2022 back in 2021. So what is it? As Orin’s blog post describes it: Windows Server Azure Edition is a special version of Windows Server built specifically to run either as an Azure IaaS VM in Azure or as a VM on an Azure Stack…

  • Get-WindowsAutopilotInfo.ps1 updated, by Microsoft this time

    Updated 2023-06-12 16:32 PST. Version 3.8 of Get-WindowsAutopilotInfo has been posted, fixing the -AddToGroup dependencies. So everything should be working as expected now, and using the new Microsoft.Graph modules. Updated 2023-06-12 14:07 PST. Now version 3.7 of Get-WindowsAutopilotInfo has been posted, changing the Write-Information lines back to Write-Host. But there’s another problem with -AddToGroup, updated…

  • Get-WindowsAutopilotInfo.ps1 updated, but not by Microsoft?

    The original version of Get-WindowsAutopilotInfo.ps1 was designed to solve a specific problem: How to get the hardware hash from an existing machine and put it into a (somewhat non-standard) CSV file that can be uploaded to Intune, Microsoft Store for Business, or even Partner Center. I created this initially while still working in Windows marketing…

  • Off on a tangent: Is a CompTIA A+ certification worth it?

    It’s always the simple questions that take me down rabbit holes. In this case, it’s a simple question: Is an A+ certification worthwhile for someone wanting to get a job in IT? If you read through the details on the CompTIA web site, you would think this is a certainty: “CompTIA A+ Is the Industry…

  • Creating a kiosk with Linux

    One of the presentations I did this week was about kiosks — how to configure them for various platforms. Since I’ve spent a fair amount of time working with Linux over the past couple of years, that was one of the platforms that I covered. Here’s an overview of what I did to create a…

  • The inner workings of a media creation tool

    I thought to myself “I wonder how many people would download and run a random executable” — implicitly trusting what it does. Of course I already knew the answer — I guess my blog is considered “trustworthy enough” to take the chance. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, see my previous blog post.)…

  • Another Windows media creation tool? Sure, why not.

    Note: See the bottom of the log for the change history and latest version. Since the initial Windows 10 release, Microsoft has made available the Media Creation Tool (MCT). Now there is a Windows 10 version and a Windows 11 version. But there are some limitations, like being architecture-dependent and only presenting a limited list…

  • VBScript as a removable Windows 11 feature?

    While I generally appreciate Microsoft’s efforts to provide ways to remove old stuff from Windows (and I wish this removal also removed the files from \Windows\WinSXS to free up disk space, but historically this hasn’t happened), an interesting one has shown up in the latest Windows Insider builds, per Neowin: An option to remove VBScript.…

  • Want to block Windows 11 “moments” that add new features?

    Microsoft announced on February 9th that they are adding a new controls to Windows 11 22H2 (and beyond) that allow organizations to temporarily turn off new features that are periodically released on top of Windows 11 through Windows updates. On February 28th, they announced that those new features will be delivered in the March Patch…

  • “Something went wrong”: An Autopilot + AAD + Intune reliability retrospective

    I’m sure it would come as no surprise to anyone that the #1 troubleshooting step when you see an error message is to search for it via Google or whatever other search engine you prefer. There’s one particular error that seems to point people toward my blog post titled “Something went wrong” with OOBEADV10. As…

  • Microsoft supports Windows 11 on ARM for M1/M2-based Macs with Parallels

    I’ve written about my experiences with running Windows 11 for ARM64 on the newer ARM-based Mac devices from Apple, using both Parallels Desktop and VMware Horizon. But Microsoft’s position was always that these were unsupported solutions that you could use at your own risk. With a support article published recently, Microsoft has now “annointed” Parallels…