What Are You Doing Right Now

@jmoore said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Trying to figure out why 25% of our office 2019 installs fail.

install in a master image once and then it either works for everyone or is borked for everyone

That's good if you are going to re-image for every software release. Which is feasible, but extremely heavy.

EddieJennings

Reinstalling Cisco AMP on XenApp server golden images.

notverypunny

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@notverypunny said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@jmoore said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Trying to figure out why 25% of our office 2019 installs fail.

install in a master image once and then it either works for everyone or is borked for everyone

That's good if you are going to re-image for every software release. Which is feasible, but extremely heavy.

You mean heavy looking at the image size or looking at the IT overhead?

Image size, my W10 image with a bunch of apps is smaller than my W7 image with nothing installed, even after running all of the crap removal tools and dism image cleanup stuff that I could find.

From an overhead / maintenance point of view I've moved to using MDT + VirtualBox for our W10 image. This way it rebuilds the image from scratch every time. Been doing it this way for about a year now and haven't run into any problems. Takes about an hour from pxe booting the VM against the deployment share until I'm capturing the new image against our FOG master server. From there it automatically gets sync'd to the FOG storage nodes at our remote sites. This way there's no old update or version cruft that follows from month to month and when we want to test a new windows version or software I can copy the whole task sequence and play with it before changing the baseline / benchmark.

scottalanmiller

@notverypunny said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

You mean heavy looking at the image size or looking at the IT overhead?

As in overhead... deploying a new full image for app installations.

DustinB3403

Automating certbot. . . because

https://blog.chef.io/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/automate-all-the-things-300x224.png

wirestyle22

@DustinB3403 I haven't needed to manually renew any of my web servers in years now. It's great.

scottalanmiller

@notverypunny said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

From an overhead / maintenance point of view I've moved to using MDT + VirtualBox for our W10 image. This way it rebuilds the image from scratch every time. Been doing it this way for about a year now and haven't run into any problems. Takes about an hour from pxe booting the VM against the deployment share until I'm capturing the new image against our FOG master server. From there it automatically gets sync'd to the FOG storage nodes at our remote sites. This way there's no old update or version cruft that follows from month to month and when we want to test a new windows version or software I can copy the whole task sequence and play with it before changing the baseline / benchmark.

This part isn't bad. Making the baseline is pretty easy and totally sensible. It's needing to roll that baseline out to every machine to do the install. If it is one app, once a year... trivial. If apps go at different times to different people, and there are many of them, it's a problem.