How do I know if I am registered to vote?
Monday, October 27th, 2008It may sound like a silly question, but I found myself wondering this evening if I was actually registered to vote. I couldn’t remember any confirmation for my registration and I had no idea how to find out. It turns out that if you live in Pennsylvania you can verify that you are in fact eligible to vote for this election using the Voter Registration Status web page. You can also find your polling location. Fortunately, I will be headed to the polls next week.
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SCCM 2007
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008At work I have been assigned the task of creating an automated Windows Vista deployment using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manger 2007. With Windows XP, we manually created an automated deployment using BartPE and batch files. After the operating system was installed and the machine was joined to the domain, group policy would handle software deployment via MSI files.
Why are we looking to use SCCM when there is an additional per-machine cost? Well, we see several advantages that we need in order to be able to continue to expand out Computer Management project:
- No MSIs required – SCCM will hopefully allow us to deploy software without needing an expensive packaging application such as WISE. Not to mention, there are a lot of applications that work very poorly when packaged with MSIs, such as Office 2007 and Adobe Creative Suite). Furthermore, there are some MSI packages that conflict with others and can inevitably make a machine build fail.
- Better software deployment management – Hopefully, SCCM will allow us to be more granular when it comes to choosing which computers get what software.
- Machine Inventory/Queries – Currently, we use applications developed in-house to perform WMI queries against machines for Inventory purposes. Inventory is stored in a SQL database and queries can be performed using a web page. Quite frankly, this is code we would rather not maintain in the future. The SCCM Configmgr interface should allow us to inventory machines while also to grant access to are partners to that they can query their machines. In other words, we no longer have to reinvent the wheel. Inventory should also be more reliable.
- Offsite deployment – Currently, any machines in CLM must be connected to the Penn State network in order to be managed and receive software. This makes managing offsite devices, such as laptops, impossible. SCCM has functionality that could allow us to manage and deploy software to offsite systems through HTTPS.
- Streamlined Operating System Deployments – Thanks to the Operating System Deployment (OSD) portion of SCCM, we will hopefully be able to rapidly create, configure, and deploy Windows to machines using a variety of distribution mechanisms including PXE, USB Drives, and DVD Media. We hope to incorporate all of the features of our current imaging process into this. SCCM OSD also uses ImageX to create images similar in the way that Symantec Ghost does. This should eliminate our dependency on Ghost licensing.
We’re still investigating SCCM and there are several experiments under way. One thing that I have found is SCCM does not support OS deployments via a restore partition on the physical disk. This is a requirement for us because we have a lab environmment where an entire lab of 50+ machines may need rebuilt over. Pushing out the OS over the network could eat up a lot more bandwidth than is necessary. We will have to find a way to work around this, which probably means throwing out the native SCCM boot shell (TSBootShell.exe) and writing a simple one that meets our needs.