ConfigMgr Tech Preview Install Guide

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Hey all,
After seeing Adam Gross’ very interesting content on CM TechPreview’s new AdminService feature, I immediately started to wonder how I could go about using it in place of remote WMI Operations.
So I connected to my stale Tech Preview Environment (it was TP 1806, lol!) and found it had expired 😢.
After googling for 14 seconds, I found no one had made a completely slap-dash guide to deploying the current version of CM Tech preview complete with all of the links you’ll need, so I decided to do that here.
note: I am assuming you’ve installed ConfigMgr **a lot of times** before this, so I won’t go too in-depth into what you need to do for each step.  Where relevant I provide a link to a post with the exact step you need to do, in case you’re not sure.

Have an AD domain

You must have a domain to setup ConfigMgr.  Womp womp.  If you need a domain controller, make a new Server 2019 VM and follow this blog post for a one-click domain controller install.

Make a Service Account

You don’t want to be stuck doing this when you get to the SQL Install step so do it now.  Make a new account and set it to never expire and give it limited perms.
Do not place it in Domain Admins or Enterprise Admins

Continue reading →

Progressive Automation: Part I

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Progressive automation - real world automation in increasing complexity

In this series, I thought it’d be fun to walk through the common phases of an automation initiative and specifically show how I love to handle this sort of situation when it arises today.

We’ll walk through recognizing a good opportunity to move a manual task to automation covering these three main steps, over the next few posts here:

  • Begin with something terrible and manual and ease the pain by adding a simple script
  • Increase the sophistication and take it to the next level by adding a User Interface
  • Migrate our Automation from a PowerShell UI to a simple and easy asp.net portal which calls a script to run the task

Depending on the amount of steam I have left, we may even go one step further and make our dotnet site more advanced, if you all are interested ☺

Our goal is to go from ‘hey it actually worked’ to ‘It works pretty well now’, to ‘hey it actually still works!’

Tell me where it hurts

You should always start your automation by finding the biggest pain points or wastes of time and starting there.  Ideal cases are things that:

  • Require your specific manual intervention (+3 points)
  • Have to happen in an off hour or over the weekend (+5 points)
  • Are hard to do, or repetitive  (+5 points)
  • Have a nasty penalty if you get them wrong (+5 points)

Add them up and if you’re over 10 then you should think about automating it. Hell, if it’s over 6, you should automate it. Continue reading →

PowerShell – Testing endpoints that perform Anti-forgery verification

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First off, big thanks go to 🐦Ryan Ephgrave, an incredibly talented and easy to work with PowerShell and dotnet god I have the pleasure to learn from over at #BigBank™ (its a great thing LinkedIn doesn’t exist…)

We had a situation arise recently where we needed to create some Integration tests in Pester to validate a long list of web pages to be sure they responded after a deployment.  I started out manually writing a litany of Pester tests by hand like this:


Context 'Post Deployment Validation' {
    It 'Website #1 should be accessible' {
        $url = 'https://someserver:someport/someEndpoint'
        $results = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $url -UseDefaultCredentials
        $results.StatusCode | should be 200
    }

    It 'Website #2 should be accessible' {
        $url = 'https://someOtherserver:someport/someEndpoint'
        $results = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $url -UseDefaultCredentials
        $results.StatusCode | should be 200
    }[...]
}

I spoke with the team about what I was doing and Ryan drew my attention to the very neat TestCases of Pester, which you can read more about here.

With a bit of work, I converted my long list of tests (which I typed by hand…why?  Because I finally got a PS4 and I stayed up too late playing Sekiro!) into a JSON file like this.

[
    {
        "SiteName" : "Our Home Page",
        "Url" : "https://someserver:someport/someEndpoint"        
    },
    {
        "SiteName" : "Our WebApp #1",
        "Url" : "https://someOtherserver:someport/someEndpoint"        
    }
]

Then to hook this up to our Pester test from before and… Continue reading →

ClientFaux 2.0 – Completely re-written, faster than ever

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As mentioned on the stage at MMSMOA, ClientFaux 2.o is now available.  Completely re-written with as a WPF GUI with automated certificate generation, multi-threading, and all the bells and whistles.

Oh, and Hardware inventory now works!

Download it and give it a try now!  To use, install it on a desktop/laptop/VM which is on a network segment which can reach your CM server.

http://bit.ly/ClientFaux

Launch ClientFaux and click to the Configure CM tab and provide your CM Server FQDN and three letter Site code.

Then click to the Device Naming page and provide your desired naming pattern and starting and ending numbers.

You can also increase the number of threads (I’ve tested up to 12 threads and seven is a good happy medium for resource usage, but feel free to go crazy).

Then to see it in action…click to the ‘Ready’ page and hit ‘Ready!’ and away we go!

 

The Big Warning

This is designed for DEMO or TestLab CM instances.  I do not recommend running it against your Production CM instance as it can create thousands and thousands of CM clients if left running for a few hours!  This can be hard to filter out of data for reporting, dashboards and the like.

Quickie: ConvertTo-PSCustomObject

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Do you ever need to quickly hop between PowerShell tabs in VScode, or have data you want to move from one session to another?

Sure, you could output your data into a .CSV file, a .JSon file, or one of hundreds of other options.  But sometimes it’s nice to just paste right into a new window and get up and running again.  For that, I wrote this small little cmdlet.

 Function ConvertTo-PSCustomObject{
    Param($InputObject)
    $out = "[PSCustomObject]@{`n"
    $Properties = $InputObject | Get-Member | Where MemberType -eq Property
    ForEach ($prop in $Properties){
        $name = $prop.Name
        if ([String]::IsNullOrEmpty($InputObject.$name)){
            $value = $null
        }
        else {
            $value = $InputObject.$name
        }

        $out += "`t$name = '$value'`n"
    }

    $out += "}"
    $out
}

And the usage of it:

ConvertTo-PSCustomObject