What a week, last week. Last week I experienced one of the strangest problems I have ever encountered and I ended up using Microsoft Premier Support. I have worked day and night for the past week so forgive me if I forget to mention something I tried during that week. Let me take you through […]
This blogpost is based on an evil thought I have had. After all, I have been a pentester for several years, so «evil» ideas are a part of my mindset. Let’s say I want to plant a backdoor on future machines, where would I put my backdoor? Inside the WIM that is used to deploy […]
Hi folks. Got the following error when trying to run Sysprep in a Windows 10 installation. Sysprep was not able to validate Your Windows installation. Review the log file at %WINDIR%\System32\Sysprep\Panther\setupact.log for details. After resolving the issue, use Sysprep to validate your installation again. Investigating the log file mentioned shows the following. SYSPRP Failed to […]
I ran into something strange during a deployment engagement at a customer. I built reference images using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2013 Update 1 (as I always do) to Windows 7 and Windows 10. In the images I included Office 2013 and other stuff like Visual C++. After I deployed those images to my test machines […]
I was going to use Johan Arwidmark’s hydration script to get a lab going. Johan Arwidmark’s hydration script is explained in detail here: http://deploymentresearch.com/Research/Post/407/The-Hydration-Kit-for-System-Center-2012-R2-is-available-for-download To get the hydration going you will have to download many files as explained in the article from Johan (Visual C++, SQL Express etc). In order to streamline the downloads a […]
Been a while since I have posted anything related to deployment, but I have thought a long time about this post. The reason why I have hesitated blogging about this is the legal issues about it. I have finally concluded that this is okay to publish, since the information is already available on the Internet […]
During deployment the logs are saved different locations depending on the process that creates the log files. Take a look at the list below and hopefully it can spare you a couple of minutes. Scenario Location WinPE before formatting HDD X:WindowsTempSMSTSLog WinPE after HDD is formatted X:SMSTSLog C:_SMSTaskSequencelogssmstslog Windows OS during Task Sequence execution C:_SMSTaskSequenceLogsSMSTSLog […]
When using custom scripts for Detection Methods you have the possibility to use a Powershell script. However, if your environment has security in focus, then setting the ExecutionPolicy for Powershell scripts to anything other than AllSigned is not an option. This means you have to sign your scripts before running them. Christian has written an […]
Ever wondered how rate limits on Distribution Points in ConfigMgr 2012 work? When I one day accidentally updated all the distribution points at a customer site it was time to learn quickly. There are three modes for rate limits and these are set per Distribution Point. Unlimited sending is self-explainatory, but the pulse mode and […]
15.01.2013 UPDATE: New Query As you probably already know Oracle just released a Java update to patch two critical vulnerabilities, including one that had been exploited in ongoing and accelerating attacks. https://blogs.oracle.com/security/entry/october_2012_critical_patch_update So I thought that this was a good time as ever to make a little list of tips that could be helpful keeping Java […]