Ideas for improving SCCM Win7 Deployments

[ScriptingIT]

The lastest SCCM/OSD is the best it has been but it still has a number or obvious issues and always has. I'm tempted to work on a few and thought I'd start here (might be already done after all).

 

Problem 1

 

The worst problem IMO is logging for several reasons:

 

It changes location all the time (well three times and it's not that hard to follow but it is still a pain in general)

For every 10 lines of logs if you are really lucky one might be useful (so many repeats or overly verbose logging)

Often the useful lines of log need to be decoded with google, and sites like this

The logs are way to cryptic

The logs do not include a lot of useful data (poor usersname or password for mapping drives say)

The logs lack documentation (nice flow through guides for typical builds and lookups on everything)

 

Tool 1

 

So I wondered if I could be motivated to write a tool that watches the logs (even as they move) and just translates some of the significant events. It might read from an ini so those events can be added over time and in phases.

It could run at the different stages just watching the log with a "show logs" button maybe.

 

Another tool might just read the events out of SCCM's System Status, deployments advert, just flow through logs for a single machine. These logs are quite useful but I find viewing them could be a lot better (but then there might already be better ways).

 

Anyone interested or has done or seen something similar?

[anyweb]

sounds interesting go for it !

[ScriptingIT]

In the end it was just easier to write a simpler deployment toolset and do our own logging so I'm not likely to do this if anyone else wants it. Anyweb feel free to just delete it.

 

The issue here is not the tool (that is simple) its the translation table (that's to big a job for google half the time). Still there are some that could be captured and usefully shown with some set comments. Run a script at the end of critical task sequences that checks, maps a drive, and logs centrally to it would probably be better. Create the log as something like:

 

COMPNAME_LASTUSER_IPSUBNET.txt.

 

The computers name can be read from the local REG in PE (and last user or newest user profile dir etc). Mmmmm.

[ScriptingIT]

So that was not a hard POC. Here is some untested autoit code you could run like this:

 

CheckFileExists "C:\Program Files\My File\MyFile.exe","::Sensible name or task, where we are in the sequence, thanks for all the fish::"

 

And you would get a centralised log showing where that machine is in the process and some time stamping etc. That's my kind of logging, really basic. Code would need error trapping, testing etc. AutoIT compiles to an EXE (password security). 10 lines of autoit to better SCCM/OSD logging (in terms of seeing useful info while machines build).

 

 

Dim $Octecs[1]

If $CmdLine[0] < 2 then MsgBox(0,"ERROR","You need to call " & @ScriptFullPath & " with " & chr(34) & "LOG ENTRY,FILE TO CHECK FOR" & chr(34))

 

$2Log = $CmdLine[1]

$2CheckExists = $CmdLine[2]

 

DriveMapAdd ( "Z:", "\\server\share",0, "domain\user", "password")

 

If FileExists($2CheckExists) Then

FileWriteLine("Z:\Logs\" & @IPAddress1 & "_" & @ComputerName & ".txt","Checking for file:" & $2CheckExists & @CRLF & $2Log & @CRLF & " ERROR:File does exit")

Else

FileWriteLine("Z:\Logs\" & @IPAddress1 & "_" & @ComputerName & ".txt",$2Log & @CRLF & " SUCCESS:File does NOT exit")

EndIf