Mind Circus

Following up from my previous post, DisplayLink have just announced availability of an MSI installer for DisplayLink Software.

Check out the Press Release, or skip straight to the Corporate Install download page if you know why you want it

This is something that has beeen bugging me ever since I set up our BDD 2007 + WDS setup almost a year ago. Even though I was able to create a 64-bit WIM boot image via MDT and load it onto the WDS server, the 64-bit Boot Image was never shown to me when PXE booting from a 64-bit capable PC. All I could see and boot, was the 32-bit boot images. Argh!

After fruitless searching I resigned myself to the fact that if I wanted to deploy Vista 64 I’d just burn an ISO of the 64-bit WinPE Boot Image and install from there. Fortunately, we rarely need to deploy 64-bit Vista, but this may change soon.

However, just now, I found the solution…

To enable 64-bit Boot Images via PXE with WDS, you need to run this command on the WDS Server:

wdsutil /set-server /architecturediscovery:yes

Why this was never mentioned in the Documentation that I read for MDT/BDD I’ll never know (maybe I just missed it), but finally I can boot to 64-bit WinPE and deploy 64-bit Vista from the network, hooray!

I found the answer on EggHeadCafe by searching for: “mdt 2008 deploy 64-bit vista pxe”. Roughly half way down the hard-to-read page was the nugget I needed.

For reference, there’s a proper Microsoft KB article explaining the solution.

Really hopes this helps someone out!

As standard, the Visual Studio 2005 setup installs the original SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. In most environments this is highly undesirable – particularly as Vista has “app compatability” issues with the original SQL Express 2005.

If you want to get the Visual Studio setup to install SQL Server 2005 Express Edition SP2 instead, check out these great instructions by Aaron Stebner.

Here’s what I did for reference:

1. Went to the SQL Express 2005 SP2 download page.
2. Downloaded both packages.
3. Navigated to the Visual Studio install share and located the SQL Express installers (\wcu\SSE\).
4. Renamed the existing installers to *.old
5. Copied the new installers to the same directory.
6. All done

This one had me stumped, but it’ll teach me to search the internet properly before blundering through. Even if you allow the Windows Firewall to accept Remote Desktop Connections you still need to enable Terminal Services elsewhere in the GP hierarchy. D’oh!

Here’s what you need to enable Remote Desktop remotely:

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Network > Network Connections > Windows Firewall > Domain Profile > Windows Firewall: Allow Remote Desktop Exception

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Terminal Services > Allow users to connect remotely using Terminal Services

Enable both of those options and you’ll be Remote Desktop-ing into PCs by the next day (or rather, until your Domain clients refresh their Group Policy settings )

Site disappeared for a few days as my host moved servers, and muggins here forgot he handled his own DNS

Happy New Year everyone!

Phil