HomeKit Stops working with Meross, Kasa and other IoT devices

I use HomeKit for all of the automation. It works great with integrating all devices into one ecosystem. A few months ago, many of my Meross and Kasa devices, along with a few other manufacturers, stopped working with HomeKit. This happened after the iOS 17.3 update. I have researched this over and over until I finally figured out what the problem was last week.I have read several other posts on the internet saying this also happened to others. My...

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Trigger Windows Update in ConfigMgr without PowerShell

I've been meaning to share this blog post for some time now, and finally got around to it. If you need to trigger a Windows update without using PowerShell, there is a way to do it. In newer versions of Windows 10, usoclient.exe is used to initiate an update scan. However, most of its parameters no longer work except for startinteractivescan. The issue I faced was that it had to be executed as the system account or as the end user in ConfigMgr. Although...

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Imaging using MDT with Autopilot

If you have a system that has been infected or the drive had to be replaced, you'll need to lay down a new bare OS and then have autopilot finish up the configuration of the machine. For this, we are using MDT as it is easy to maintain and very fast at imaging. I used this as a template to come up with the solution we are now using. The first thing I did was to use everything verbatim from the section of the blog named "How to get the Windows...

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Find Programs and Features Uninstall Registry Keys with PowerShell

 I am working on a new package to upgrade one of the applications. This time, it requires I uninstall the old app first before installing the new version. There are two different versions, so I needed to retrieve the uninstall strings for both. That is when I decided to write this script that will scan the registry for the application and list the key values as shown below. It scans both the x86 and x64 Uninstall registry entries. The script...

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Configuring Wake-On-LAN for Dell Systems

The firm I am at has recently upgraded all systems to the newest model Dells. In doing so, some of the settings for configuring WOL have changed in the BIOS. I have rewritten this script to cover all changes to the OS, BIOS, and NIC. The script uses the DellSMBios PowerShell module to configure the BIOS settings. Thanks to these sites for pertinent information that helped with writing this tool:How to setup Wake on LAN on your Dell SystemHow to Turn...

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MECM System Cleanup

Recently, we started a cleanup of AD. Once the cleanup was completed, I wanted ConfigMgr cleaned up right away too. It is set to clean up old items, but it was not quick enough for me so I wrote the following tool that will query the All Systems collection via SQL and then reads the attributes in AD to see if the system is disabled. It will delete each disabled system from ConfigMgr at the end. Below is an example of it displaying a list of machines,...

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Configuration Manager PowerShell Module: An update to the existing console is available

I was recently writing a new PowerShell tool to clean up Configuration Manager of old systems. When I ran the import-module cmdlet, I got the message The module was being imported from the Configuration Manager server. I always keep ConfigMgr up-to-date with the latest version within days of release and I saw the console was 5.2203.1063.2400. Doing a little digging, I found this was coming from the console that was installed on my laptop and...

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Bitlocker Recovery Password AD Backup and Cleanup

This PowerShell script not only backs up the Bitlocker recovery password to AD but also cleans out previous backups made that do not match the current password associated with the machine. The script retrieves the local bitlocker password along with all recovery passwords written to AD. It will then parse through the associated passwords and remove all that does not match the one associated with the local machine. This greatly helps keep AD...

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Automating Dell TPM Configuration

Over the years, we have manually configured the TPM before imaging a system as part of our build process. Dell has since given the ability to automate the entire process after giving the option to automate clearing the TPM. That was always been the big stopper in full automation. I wrote a series of scripts that I put into the build process that do all of the necessary steps in readying the TPM for bitlocker as shown below. The Smart Reporting,...

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Identify Machines a User is Logged Into using Carbon Black

If you have Carbon Black in your environment, you can use it to identify which machines a user account is logged into. Carbon Black collects a vast amount of data on machines and reports it to the cloud database. The following is how to use Carbon Black to list the machines:Log into the Carbon Black Cloud PortalClick the Investigate tabIn the investigate search field at the top, enter the following: Enter process_username:<username> in...

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Last Server Reboot Reporting

Recently, we needed a report of the last boot time of all servers. I wrote this PowerShell script that queries AD for a list of all windows servers and then does a WMI query on each server for the LastBootUpTime. It then calculates the number of days and writes this to an object with the computer name and the number of days since the last reboot. It will write this info to a CSV file. You can download the script from my GitHub site. Import-Module -Name ActiveDirectory -Force #Get list of windows based servers $Servers = Get-ADComputer...

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Configure SQL Server Firewall Ports with PowerShell

 I recently had to rebuild the Configuration Manager server. As I was running the prerequisite tool, it showed it could not communicate with the SQL server that is separate from the Configuration Manager Server. The issue ended up being ports needed to be opened up. This PowerShell script will configure the correct ports. It also adds to the description as to what services the port is opened up for in Configuration Manager. If the rule is already present, it skips over. If you open up a rule after the script is executed, you will see...

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Troubleshooting No Task Sequences are available (Tasksequence.xml does not exist, is empty, or is inaccessible)

 I encountered this error when working with MDT right after deleting two old task sequences. To troubleshoot this, I went to the logs directory in the MDT hierarchy. I specified in the customsettings.ini file to write all build logs to this specific directory:SLShare=\\BUILD\PRODDeploymentShare$\LogsSLShareDynamicLogging=\\BUILD\PRODDeploymentShare$\Logs\%ComputerName%When I went into the logs, I opened up the only log there, BDD.log, and...

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How to effectively add Office updates to the update folder

If you are still using an on-prem version of office, you know the need to populate the Updates folder so updates get applied when Office is installed instead of having to wait for the updates to download and then be installed. The issue I have run into is some of the updates, once extracted, are named the same. To resolve this, I extract each update from the cab file. Next, I open up the msp file using ORCA. In the MsiPatchMetadata table, you will...

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Installing WinGet via PowerShell

 I wanted to install Winget via PowerShell in an automated process. The first thing I did was to go to the Winget GitHub site and select the latest version of the Windows Package Manager. Under the latest version page, I clicked on the file with the extension of msixbundle and downloaded it to my machine.Now that it is on your machine, you can automate the installation with a PowerShell one-liner script where the PS1 file resides in the same directory as the Winget installer. The script will search the current directory for a msixbundle file...

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Administrator Reporting Tool

This PowerShell tool queries AD for a list of machines in the specified administrative admin groups. The list is specified by modifying the script with the groups to be queried. The following example shows how to add groups to the query. When there are multiple groups, they can be divided off by using the pipe character between each group.Where-Object {$_.MemberOf -match 'Admins|Domain Admins|System Admins|'}There is the parameter called $Days. This specifies how many days old the account needs to be so it is not displayed in the report anymore. I...

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Installing Printers via ConfigMgr for Non-Admin Users

KB5005652 resolved the "PrintNightMare" vulnerability, but it also brought many companies to a halt when it came to end-users installing printers if they did not have administrator privileges. During the time since the update, we had our help desk install printers for users on an as-needed basis. There was a workaround by setting the RestrictDriverInstallationToAdministrators to 0 to override the fix, but this would have thwarted the security vulnerability. I came up with the fix to install printers using configuration manager since...

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PowerShell: Install Fonts

Font installation using PowerShell has changed since Windows 10 1909. The old way of doing it with PowerShell no longer works. This new script was originally written by Ben Reader who is a fellow Microsoft MVP from Australia. I took the script and modified it by improving on user interface and file tweaks. This script gets a list of all font files that exist in the same directory. It then parses through each font file getting the font name attribute at which point it copies the file to c:\windows\Fonts. Next, it registers the font by...

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Configuration Manager Message ID 11170 Error

I was in the process of pushing out the Microsoft Windows 10 20H2 upgrade when I had 23 systems that errored out. They reported the error shown below. After looking at the logs and at Software Center on the target machine, I found the target machine was not seeing the deployment under Operating Systems. The fix was to reinstall the client on the target machine. Once the reinstall completed and the client synchronized with the ConfigMgr server,...

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Automating the Deletion of Windows.old

It is the beginning of 2021 and my first project for the new year is upgrading all systems to Windows 10 20H2. At the end of the upgrades comes the cleanup and there is no clean way to do this for system admins. Cleanmgr.exe is now deprecated as of Windows 10 2004. There is not a PowerShell option for controlling storage sense. Cleanmgr.exe /AUTOCLEAN would open up cleanmgr.exe and then freeze. It never deleted the folder and was stuck at zero CPU...

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