taging an installion / using a snap in / where to start?

[palloquin]

Hi,

I’m looking for a way to keep track of which image or version I have installed on my clients.

I’m thinking about using a snapin to write a registry key that holds this info. But, I’m open to other suggestions.

If I use the snap in, is there a way I can pass the name of the image that was just deployed as an argument to the snap in?

[george1421]

@palloquin We do something similar, but its two fold.

1. We use MDT to build the golden image. During MDT build, we create a hklm/software/version tag. Then we create keys under that like BuidRelease which is the date code that MDT created the reference image, BuildCode which is an floating point control number we use internally, plus a few other bits of information.
2. Then during imaging we use a post install script to update the setupcomplete.cmd with some “REG ADD” commands that include keys to ImageName and InstallDate.

You have to remember here that when FOG is deploy, the deployment engine FOS, is linux so it can’t really interact with the windows computer (that is not completely true) so all it can do is leave bread crumbs behind for OOBE to find.

[george1421]

Here is the bit I referred to as not completely true.

This script if used in the post install script give you an example of updating a registry key using FOS.

#!/bin/bash
regfile="/ntfs/Windows/System32/config/SOFTWARE"
key="\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DevicePath"
devpath="%SystemRoot%\DRV;%SystemRoot%\inf;";
reged -e "$regfile" &>/dev/null <<EOFREG
ed $key
$devpath
q
y
EOFREG

key is the keypath in hklm referenced by regfile. The devpath value is the value being changed. I personally don’t like poking about in the windows registry from the linux side. IMO its much safer to just leave bread crumbs and let windows make the changes to windows.

[palloquin]

Hi George!

Thank you for your quick repsonse. I get what you are saying. I agree that I would prefere not to mess with the windows registry externally if there is another way to do things.
We don’t sysprep the systems, seems less hassle in our situation. But, the bread crumbs you mention can be picked up by any system I suppose, not just OOBE, but a snapin script for example…

But, which bread crumbs are your refering to? and how would you go about leaving that trail?