Multicasting with MDT 2010 and WDS
Today was the biggest test of my on-going experiments with MDT 2010 and WDS. With my new colleague, we deployed our customised Windows 7 image to our second computer lab. Unlike a few weeks ago when we did our first lab, this time we deployed the image to all the computers at once. I wanted to save time by not doing the computers in batches, but I also wanted to test out how the server would behave under a full load of 37/8 machines.
I’m pleased to say that despite being a positively ancient Pentium 4 class server, the server handled the load without issue. Here is a screenshot of the server delivering the image to 37 clients at once:
CPU Usage:
Network Usage:
The deployment was a success, with only 2 clients giving problems. One was a suspected RAM problem that was resolved by deploying the image again. The second machine received the image fine, but had an issue extracting it, which leads me to suspect that there could be bad sectors on the hard drive. I will give that machine my attention tomorrow and see if I can get it to image correctly.
Overall I am very pleased with the performance of the deployment. While I have pretty much got the nuts and bolts in place now, I plan to spend further time tweaking and tailoring the experience to reduce the number of screens that need information entered into. MDT 2010 has some quirks which can be annoying, and there are still many areas I need to get familiar with. I will continue to post my guide on setting up MDT and WDS once I’ve gone over a few more steps to double check my facts.
When dust strikes back
Dust and dirt are the bane of computer users everywhere. Dust accumulates and blocks ventilation, which can then cause overheating when there isn’t sufficient airflow to cool a component down. Besides that, aesthetically speaking dust is also ugly. Today, I encountered the following air filter from a projector that was complaining about overheating:
Put simply, that is what happens when you have a busy classroom, wooden floors, ceiling fans and open windows nearby. Dust builds up really quickly in the air filter, causing the projector to overheat on a boiling day like today. Left too long, the overheating will cause various forms of damage: shorter lamp life, scorched LCD colour panels or permanent noisier operation of the projector.
Over the course of this year, I intend to use our newly reformed pupil computer service group to go around and clean these filters. Not a glamorous job, but it needs to be done. It’s one of those minor things that my ex-colleague and I always wanted to do but never got the time to do unless a projector overheated.
This just goes to show that IT isn’t all about the money and fame that some people think it is. Welcome to the dirty side 
MDT 2010: Getting the basics in place
As promised, I’m finally blogging about my experiences so far in using MDT 2010 to deploy Windows 7 in our computer rooms. It’s been a steep learning curve; frustrating at times, rewarding at other times. I’m going to split up my findings over a number of posts, which should make things easier to read.
For the deployment server, I recommend a bare metal server, or a server running under VM software that properly supports multicasting. I had a server all set up and ready to deploy, only to discover that Citrix XenServer is very fussy about passing on multicast packets. I haven’t had the chance yet to dig in depth to figure out how to sort that issue out. Instead, I returned an ancient Pentium 4 server to service, which so far is proving fine for the job.
Here are my first steps on the road to hopeful deployment bliss:
- Make sure you already have Active Directory, DHCP and DNS running on the network. Deployment needs these facilities to run properly.
- Install, configure, update and activate Windows Server 2008 R2. This includes network card drivers, even if Server comes with a driver out the box.
- Install both the Deployment and Transport Server roles of the Windows Deployment Services role. This is needed to enable multicasting.
- Optional – install Daemon Tools so that you can mount ISO images rather than needing to work with DVD’s. Makes life easier and faster from what I’ve found.
- Install the Windows 7 Automated Installation Kit (AIK), available from Microsoft’s website. File is about 1.7GB in size.
- Download and install the supplemental pack for the AIK, as this version matches the versions of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.
- Download and install the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Update 1.
- At this point, stop working on the server. The basics are in place hardware wise, but the network needs to be checked if it will properly support multicasting. If you have unmanaged switches, you should be ok to proceed further without needing to change anything. If you have managed switches, make sure to turn the IGMP protocol on, as well as any IGMP filtering options if they are available. You will need to refer to the manufacturer’s manuals for this as each switch is different.
- We are well on our way to having the base of the deployment solution in place now. In the next post, I will continue with the configuration of the various components of the solution.
Back to work tomorrow
Tomorrow is my first day back at work for 2012. It also happens to be the day when the grade 12 learners of 2011 receive their results at the school. This means that the day will be chaotic and busy until the results are released, but it’s always interesting to see the reactions of the kids to their results.
I also have a new colleague starting tomorrow, which means for the first time in just over 4 months, I won’t be working alone anymore. I’ve now been “promoted” to Senior Network Administrator, which comes with higher responsibilities but hopefully also a touch more freedom to oversee changes that need to be made. It’s a bit scary to realise that if anything goes catastrophically wrong, the buck stops with me. Then again, I’ve been in this spot the last 4 months, as well as at my previous job, so it’s nothing all that new I think.
As for my new colleague, it’s going to be interesting training him and getting him up to speed. He doesn’t have too much experience in a school environment, which is both a blessing and a curse. Curse because he needs to be moulded and trained, blessing because he will most likely be open to ideas and suggestions. He is also 13 years older than me, which is a somewhat scary feeling to be in charge of someone so much older than myself. Time will tell how our partnership works out, and if we reach the same level of ease that my former colleague and I had.
On a different note, I intend to blog a lot more this coming year. It’s about time that I start documenting my experiences with new software and tools and make this blog more useful again.
I hope everyone has an interesting, fulfilling 2012. If nothing else, changes in the tech world are going to make things interesting for sure.
Saying goodbye to FOG
In just over a week’s time, I’ll be shutting down and replacing my FOG server at work. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, and with the end of year in sight, I decided it’s as good a time as any. The main reason I’m shutting down the server is that FOG can’t really compete against the tools available from Microsoft for free for imaging Windows 7.
When it comes to imaging Windows XP, FOG is a wonderful tool. It works and works very well at this task. I think it beats the stuffing out of Symantec Ghost, and rightly so. It’s free, doesn’t require any licenses and is mostly straightforward to use. When it comes to Windows 7 however, the situation becomes a little more tricky due to the way Windows 7 is built. Windows 7 needs far more input for a successful clone in comparison to XP. As such, I’m looking to reduce the number of steps involved, not increase them.
Besides the above, I’ve also run into some issues with FOG over the last year. My most major issue is multicast not being entirely reliable. Despite being correctly configured, multicast is still a hit and miss affair on FOG in my experience. It’s no fun to start up 39 pc’s in a lab, only to have them sit and wait on a blue “Please Wait” screen. The pc’s then need to be imaged via unicast, and this takes a lot longer.
Another issue that has cropped up but isn’t FOG’s fault directly is speed when running in a virtual environment. We run a Citrix Xen server at work. One of the downsides is that if your guest OS isn’t supported, your OS will run a lot slower than if it was supported. Specifically, it comes down to the optimised storage and network drivers giving a supported OS the edge. Ubuntu Linux support under Citrix Xen is pretty thin at best, and since FOG runs best on Ubuntu, it’s a bit of catch-22 situation. Imaging is about half the speed it was on a physical server, due to no optimised drivers.
To replace FOG, I will be using Microsoft’s Deployment Toolkit 2010 as well as Windows Deployment Services, which is built into Server 2008 and up. In the time I’ve spent experimenting with MDT so far, I’ve come to see its power and flexibility. With some thought and a few clicks, I can set up a sequence that will SYSPREP and capture a computer, or will deploy an image to a computer. It can also join that computer to the domain without any 3rd party tools or separate accounts in Active Directory. Another benefit is that the images are stored in the WIM file format, which can be opened, edited and serviced by a number of tools. WIM files are also pretty highly compressed, which is a big bonus.
Once I get going with reimaging my computer labs, I’ll be posting more info on the blog on my experiences and thoughts with these tools. To FOG, I say thank you for 3 years of service, and I wish you continued success as a project. You are one of the few open source projects I truly enjoyed working with.
Windows XP at 10 years old
I must admit that it is sometimes hard to believe that XP is 10 years old now. In those 10 years, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen its various set up and progress bars, fought with infections, bad Windows Updates, incompatible software and many other things lost to the mists of time.
My first exposure to XP came in in my Grade 10 year at high school – 2001. It was a few weeks after XP came out and someone I knew in the computer room had managed to obtain a copy through a friend – illegally of course. We were all dying to know what XP felt and looked like, so we tested it on a spare computer in that lab. Of course, that’s when we ran head first into issues: The Novell Netware Client we were using didn’t run on XP, the Pegasus Mail version also didn’t run on XP, we couldn’t send and receive email using our crazy dial up modem solution. And of course, despite being based on Windows 2000, XP crashed a lot in those early days. Not nearly as much as ME or 98, but I saw plenty of blue Stop Screens in those early years. Oh, and the whole activation business was also a very new and untested step, with only Office XP before it being a wide spread product that required such a new and drastic step.
Eager to move away from the terrible ME at home, I got a copy of XP and installed it on our family pc. Suffice to say, I ran into the same sorts of issues with blue screens, incompatible drivers and software and just general irritations at how XP did things. In particular, I remember the Nvidia drivers giving a lot of grief, causing many random blue screens. Funny enough, that happened again at Vista’s launch. Food for thought…
Still, once it was coupled with Office XP, Windows XP became the base of my computing career. XP was a brilliant OS, but time has caught up with it. Malware, exploits and lack of features drove me to Vista initially, then Windows 7. These days, using XP is almost painful: no Aero Snapping, no Start Menu search, no DirectX 10/11 for increased visual fidelity and more. Imaging it across a network is painful as you need to maintain multiple images because you can’t make the image easily hardware independent.
Microsoft have been doing their best to get people to move from XP and with good reason – XP is a pretty insecure OS now in 2011. The firewall in XP is incredibly primitive, which requires a 3rd party piece of software to really do the job. All user accounts are created as Administrators on the initial set up screen, even if it’s SP3 integrated. There’s no User Account Control, no ASLR and DEP is primitive.
I’m not sad to see XP start to fade away to be honest. It’s almost 2012, and while I will always have a fond spot in my heart for XP, it’s time for it to take that well deserved retirement now.
Handbrake and MP4
When it comes to watching videos on a computer, there is one thing that can be really annoying: different video formats. Over the years, the number of formats have increased, leading to some confusion and incompatibility. Whether it’s DivX, XVID, WMV, AVI, MPEG2, MPEG, Quicktime MOV, Ogg Video, Flash video and others, it can be downright confusing. The other problem is that since some of these formats are proprietary, they don’t easily play outside of their own players. Of course, there are universal players like VLC or codec packs, but these come with their own cons as well.
The other downside is that some of these formats are quite old, and as a consequence eat up large amounts of hard drive space due to less efficient compression schemes.
A couple of months ago, I discovered HandBrake: a free and open source video transcoder that uses the free and open source x264 encoder. In simpler terms, HandBrake is a graphical frontend to the x264 encoder, which outputs MP4 videos.
HandBrake main window
Speaking of MP4, I learnt that both the older DivX format as well as XVID use an older MP4 standard, called Part 2 ASP. The MP4 output by x264 is called Part 10 AVC, and is more modern than the older standard.
What this boils down to is that with HandBrake, you can convert almost any video format into the standards based MP4-AVC format. The end result is a file that can be played by hundreds of devices and the output file is quite possibly a lot smaller than the source file.
I have managed to shave off over 80GB on my video collection by converting the files into MP4-AVC. Some video files refuse to convert, and some others end up larger in MP4 format than what they originally were. This however is the vast minority, with the majority converting exceptionally well.
One of the more interesting things about the x264 encoder is that it is multi-core and multi-processor aware. Simply put, once you start an encode, x264 will max out your CPU. If you plan to convert many files, make sure you have decent cooling on your CPU. x264 does not use the GPU in graphics cards, which means that encoding takes a lot longer. From what I read, the reason for this is that graphics cards don’t output the same visual quality or have the flexibility of what a CPU based encoder can do.
It takes a while to understand how HandBrake works, but once you figure it out, the reward is worth it. You can download a copy from http://handbrake.fr/ and start saving on hard drive space now. Be sure to spend some time reading the wiki and user guides first however.
Accursed HP Printers
Yesterday, I swapped out a computer for a member of our staff. She uses her computer day in and day out, and the old Pentium 4 machine she had was just not cutting it anymore. Although it still works perfectly, speed had become a major problem. As such, a replacement had been purchased some time ago, but I was unable to place the computer into the office until yesterday.
The new machine is a Core i3 and runs Windows 7 x64. It screams along and is responsive in the way new computers are. I duly copied over all her documents, installed a couple of custom programs and so on. Then came the time to install the printer in her office. It’s an old HP LaserJet 1010, a real workhorse of a printer. It’s not flashy and is not fast, but these printers just keep working and working. That is, until the printer met Windows 7. If you are interested, here is a link to the specs of said printer: HP LaserJet 1010 Series Specifications
There are no drivers for this printer in Windows 7, and a look on HP’s website only reveals Vista drivers. A little further digging reveals that this printer is not supported in Windows 7, although bizarrely enough it’s supported under Mac OSX 10.7, a much newer OS than Windows 7.
I tried using the Vista x64 driver, which installed fine. The printer even printed a test page. However, when you right click the printer under Devices and Printers to configure Print Settings, it causes Windows Explorer to crash. Each and every time, Windows Explorer will crash if you try to configure the printer. This was obviously unacceptable, so I set out to discover if there was a work around. It turns out that the only way to make this printer work reliably is to assign another HP LaserJet model as the driver, in this case the HP LaserJet 3050 driver. It does leave an Unidentified Device under Devices and Printers, but there is nothing that can be done.
The thing that angers me about this is that we have a slightly later model around the school as well: the HP LaserJet 1018 – Specifications here. For all intents and purposes, the devices are near identical. They take the same cartridge, print at the same speed and look near identical, apart from the colour. The 1018 is supported under Windows 7. What’s even more frustrating is that there is a driver for Mac OSX 10.7 for the 1010, but no driver for Windows 7. Hell, all HP had to do is tweak the Vista driver slightly and make it available for Windows 7.
While I understand that the 1018 is a later model by a year or more, there really is no reason why the 1010 can’t be supported under Windows 7. This is one area concerning HP printers that I really don’t like, and I’m not the only one. I will look and see if the Universal Print driver won’t perhaps support the 1010, though I’m probably going to be out of luck on that one as well.
When your servers go nuts
Last week was the first week I’ve worked alone at work since early 2010. Back then, my colleague was on a week’s leave after our massive network migration. This time, it was because I was now on my own. The first two days of the week went smooth enough, nothing too crazy happening.
Wednesday was the start of the chaos. The day itself started out smoothly. Lunch time, our principal took the school’s admin staff (including myself) out to high tea. It was a nice way to spend 2 hours off campus doing nothing more than relaxing and chatting with colleagues. Eventually it ended and we headed off back to work. I sat down at my computer and noticed that Outlook had frozen. This was bizarre, as it has never locked up like that before. A moment later, the head of IT came to tell me that staff had not been able to access their email for a short while. I tried to Remote Desktop into the Exchange server, only to find that it wouldn’t connect. I opened up XenCenter, only to find that it couldn’t connect as well.
I proceeded into the server room to discover that the big virtual server we had bought earlier this year had frozen rock solid. Exchange, Anti-Virus and internet access/filtering was down for everyone. I had to force a reboot via the reset switch, and that’s when things got out of hand. After the power cycle, the server tried to boot from the network, which was strange to me. Network boot was the last option on the boot order list and should not have happened. I tried resetting again, only to have the same issue. Another restart and I decided to check out the BIOS. Lo and behold, the 16GB Kingston SSD drive that was the “brain” of the server was not being seen in the BIOS. Now I knew I had a real problem. I tried swapping SATA cables and changing the port on the server’s motherboard, to no avail. Our hardware supplier suggested I try the drive in a desktop pc to see if it would pick up. No luck either, and valuable time wasted.
The end of an era at work
Last week Wednesday, an era at work came to an end. My colleague finished his last day of work at the school and was about to move out again into the big wide world of business IT. Apart from a total of about 3 weeks, the two of us have been together as a team for 2 and a half years, changing things left, right and centre at work.
Stepping back a bit, my colleague resigned on Friday the 5th of August, just before the school had a long 4 day weekend. When we came back in on the Wednesday, he dropped the news to me. I was shocked, yet not entirely surprised by it. Looking back, all the signs were there that he was getting ready to move away from the school. I could write about any number of reasons why he made his choice, but I think the reality is that working in IT in a school environment tends to burn you out. Politics, budget issues, salary issues and more all contribute towards a frustration that slowly builds up. I’ve suffered some of the same problems, so I’m very sympathetic towards his decision to leave.
The biggest challenge in the couple of weeks leading up to his last day was trying to cram as much information about the school admin system into my head as possible. My colleague has been the person more or less in charge of that since the start, due to his prior experience with the product. While I’ve managed to get most of the knowledge down quite well, there are still many areas I worry about. School reports are due in a few weeks, which will be the real test of things I guess. All the procedures are in place and ready to go, but it’s usually when marks start getting entered that things go wrong.
The somewhat annoying thing is that the school hasn’t yet taken any concrete action in finding a replacement. The principal had the idea of hiring someone for the rest of this year and depending on their performance and teamwork with myself, that they may stay on permanently next year. We compiled a list of qualities needed in a replacement and sent it on to management, but no advert has yet been published. When staff have asked me about this and I’ve told them about this fact, many of them seemed puzzled by the fact that an advert hadn’t gone out yet. I dare say that I’m pretty good at what I do, but the school network is too big for one person to handle alone, no matter how automated it is or how good the person is. Sheer size and scale just make it too much.
Above all else, I’m going to miss the team spirit I had with my colleague. We argued, had different views on technology, fought on how to to handle staff amongst other things, but in the end we were a team. We covered for each other and grew together. We balanced each other out and managed the workload between us. Time will tell whether such a bond will form with the new person, but I hope it does. There’s no real other way to handle things I think.
To my colleague, I wish you all the best. I know that you are already enjoying your new job, and I hope that you will have a long, enjoyable and constructive time at your new job. Thanks for everything bud 
P.S Indeed 
