garethEds

Hi - I always followed the instructions from a Johan A book and website where they use a separate database. Always worked for me - except now. G

Afternoon Everyone, So..... bit the bullet and re-installed MDT on a fresh server. Deployed an image using a copied over task sequence - didn't setup the database part of it all. It worked. Built well. Backed it up. Installed SQLExpress 2022 and it all broke again - no connection to the database. Tearing my hair out with this. Back to the backup......

Morning All, Does anyone know if it's possible (and how to do it) - add bulk classes to houses? I've setup the houses, but I don't want to go through each pupil adding their house field. Many thanks Gareth

Afternoon All, Has anyone who is running PaperCut ever had issues where a Windows desktop will decide whether or not to show the secure print queue/printer in the list of available printers? We are seeing W10 and 11 machines often forgetting whether or not they are meant to have a printer. All pupils should have a printer. All teachers should have a secure print queue. Any ideas? Cheers Gareth

I had that in there but took it out at one point. Are you putting the name of your share in there? Our share name is MDTDeploy$ or are you putting in the words 'DeploymentShare$'. It's clearly a permission issue somewhere. Gareth

Okay - we are connecting to the share. Latest build showed 2 errors. With Named Pipes we've never had to enter credentials. I can add then if I need to though. Here is the latest log. I cannot understand what would have changed recently to cause this. I'll add the credentials to the database and go from there again. GJE

Here is a picture of the logs - Don't mind the server name in there. Not sure why it cannot connect to the SQLShare - nothing has changed. It's all setup like it was. [ATTACH=CONFIG]71665[/ATTACH] HOw does one set the SQLShare name? It says in MDT to set it as the Deployment Share path - so I'm sure that is what we always did. Gareth

Here is a picture of the logs - Don't mind the server name in there. Not sure why it cannot connect to the SQLShare - nothing has changed. It's all setup like it was.

Will look at the logs again but it's the 'Processing rule: CSETTINGS' that is taking the time as it clearly is trying to connect to the database. MDT can see the database as all machine names are listed. I've checked all the permissions - the deployment account has the permissions to access and read the database. The named pipes are all enabled. The SQL share is fine and visible. Logs said nothing yesterday, but will try them again today. TLS 1.0 is enabled as a test. Still happening. I'll post logs once the machine has tried to build again. I'm stumped. Gareth

So what I've done is - remove all SQL software from the MDT server. Cleaned it up, restarted etc. Re-installed all SQL softwrae and reset it up with a new database. Nothing - nada. Still will not connect. WHat am I missing GJE

HI Mate - it's the dabase connection that has broken again. Not sure why. As for the drivers - what step did you add into your task sequence? Anmy chance you can DM me some screenshots of the task step? Cheers Gareth

Afternoon Everyone, My MDT server has broken. Will not connect to the database during deployment for some reason. This isn't the first time it has happened and it's annoying. So has anyone looked at other deployment solutions? I'm fed up of MDT and have no time to rebuild the server. I've considered SmartDeploy - but it is too expensive for schools. What else is there that does deployment from the original wim and then target driver selection. I'm not bothered about apps as we have PDQ Deploy to do that. Also want it to name machines based on Mac address. Like MDT - but not MDT. Cheers Gareth

Hi there - I've not touched the guests. I moved them to another server whilst trying to sort this out. Server is now on 21H2 20348.2402 yet will still not recognise the UEFI partition/boot. Gareth

Afternoon All, Following an issue with one of our HyperV servers, it seems the box has lost the ability to UEFI boot - with the error message telling me it cannot find a UEFI bootable hard drive. Never seen this before and our second server is still working fine. However - switching to a legacy boot works and Server 2022 boots up fine. DOes anyone have any ideas why this would have happened? Many thanks Gareth

Good morning, I've come into work this morning to discover one of our HyperV nodes is down and in an endless UEFI boot cycle. The UEFI boot cannot find bootable drives. They are there - I've checked the drives (RAID) and all are reported to be working. I've gone via the Legacy Boot option from the one time boot menu and the server has booted up without any issues. Can anyone advise what could have gone wrong and how to put it back to what it was? Would the BIOS be corrupt somehow? If so how? From what I can see our Cluster Aware Update ran over the weekend and the server has not recovered from that. This stopped the second server from starting off as well (thankfully). Any advice welcome, Gareth

That's annoying. I had a pupil log into the test machine and he could see the C drive. Later in the lesson I asked him to do it again and the setting had taken and he couldn't. Bit crap that - but I get it now.

Hi, I'm still having an issue understanding when configuration policies get applied to devices connected to InTune. Here with an on-premise doman we have: Machine Setting GPOs which is easy enough to understand and then depending on the user type we get settings from either a staff settings GPO or a user settings GPO. These are on shared machines. Does InTune work the same way? I have just made a configuration policy for a machine but can see the need to put some user settings in there - which I didn't think was the right thing to do. So the question is.... if I create a device with machine policies - they will get applied at the machine level. If I then split off the user policies into staff/pupil, when do they get applied? If I log in as a staff user does that configuration policy get downloaded on logon? So any changes come immediately? Example being a configuration policy that allows access to BlueTooth settings - staff can see it on our current domain, but I've set it as a machine setting on InTune so nobody can see it. I want to split that off. Do I then target policies to the user groups instead of the machines? I know how it should work, and how I want it to work - but am I missing something? Cheers Gareth

Morning Everyone, Has anyone seen an issue where OneDrive has suddenly gone from FileExplorer on an Autopiloted/InTune device? It can be accessed via Word etc but users cannot access it as a drive. It just went. I've checked OneDrive and it is on the computer. It signs in as the user as expected. Just not showing. Google search showed this has been seen in the wild, but nothing I have tried has brought it back. So - here I am asking. Cheers Gareth

Hi David, I'm sure if you searched on here there are plenty of people who have done this already with plenty of answers. I remember the time we moved from CC3 to Vanilla 2012. It was a fun time, but it was an LEA network and we were the last school to fight against centralisation. We eventually went over to the LEA. For us this meant: 1. New DC - the LEA had central DC servers that every school connected to. During the years, we've been given an on-site DC as well. 2. School Network - we had everything in place. Everything here is wired, but we are moving more and more towards wifi. We have a wifi setup that was funded centrally by the LEA via Welsh Government. It's pretty good. We are Aruba switches across the school (wired and wifi). 3. We have always used MS products and continue to push MDT as the way of building machines. I love MDT and have spent many years perfecting it. Of course, it's not officially supported by MS any more but it still works with some changes. Plenty of help on here and on the Web on how to do this. I am worried for how long it will continue to work but that is a problem for another day. At the moment, we are able to deploy Windows 11 23H2 without issues. Several people here will tell you to use AutoPilot and that cloud is the way forward. Our new network (if/when we move to Hwb Cymru's InTune for PCs) will be cloud and I am working on this at the moment. 4. We currently use PDQ Deploy for deploying applications. All of this is great if putting back an on-site network. Like I say, many will tell you that Cloud is the way forward. This is just my situation at the moment. Good luck, Gareth

We've had a nightmare connecting an autopilot'ed machine to some on-prem services. I tried getting it to map an on-prem file server but it kept asking for a username and password. Ok - these two machines were on different domains, but I did set the on-prem file server to allow anonymous access (for testing). Still didn't work. I've not tried printers yet.

Morning All, I'm in the process of setting up InTune configuration policies for our machines, staff and pupil users. I originally started by exporting our on-premise GPOs and importing them, but sort of confused myself with conflicts and so on. So I thought, I'd start again from the beginning and create new policies. This is turning out to be harder than I wanted it to be. I have taken some settings over but am worried I will miss things. Reading GPO settings on a network with the Editor is a lot easier than trying to find them in InTune. Anyway - would anyone be willing to share their policies from InTune (exported?) so I an import them to mine for a look? It'a huge favour I know. DM me and I'll send my email address. Many thanks Gareth

Morning all, Has anyone experimented with the MDT rewrite from 'Friends of MDT'? It isn't an official MS product of course but in a moment of boredom checked the backup of my MDT server and it is good - so am wondering whether to mess about and have a go installing it or building a new server and playing with it. Or maybe on this rainy Sunday morning I'll just go back to bed for a rest. Seriously though, has anyone had a go with it? How bad or good is it? Gareth

Thanks for the reply. A the moment I am on the 'All Workstation' part of things. However I am experimenting with an 'All Staff Users' policy, but my question was - when does this get put on the machine? Is it at logon time? G

Hi All, I've been reading everything on here I can find on InTune and I'm still a bit confused with (or annoyed at ) myself in that I cannot get to grips with how configuration policies work an reach the machine. I get it all on an on-site domain GPO in place setup, but I cannot see how it works from the cloud. On our current domain we have: Machine GPOs; Staff user GPOs and Pupil GPOs. We all know how they work. So how does it work on InTune. I have machines in groups and I can allocate a configuration profile full of settings to that group. We have been told that machines can be staff or pupil machines with specific settings. But this is not what I want. We have shared devices where pupils and staff could log in whenever they want. Why do I get the feeling this cannot be done with InTune? If a student logs in using their InTune credentials - do their settings get downloaded from InTune and applied when they login? Or are the 'pupil' settings already on the machine and update every now and again? What if a staff member comes along and logs in? Are the staff settings then downloaded each time? Does this make sense? I'm feeling a bit thick. Cheers Gareth

@kennysarmy - you absolute legend. After having an issue with the latest WINPE Addon (rolled it back) the two changes in that reddit article did the trick. It now builds without any issues. Now why haven't MS changed that? How are we meant to know this? Really annoys me. Gareth