Test Deployment

On the 17th we started our first test deployment. It went fairly well, but we did run into a few "issues." For all the testing that I have been doing I had hoped that it would have went smoother, but all-in-all I am not complaining.

Here are a few snags that I ran into:

Printer drivers -- I already knew that this was going to be a snag. We us a login script to give our computers the printers they are supposed to get. The script looks at the machine name. With Vista MS has decided that users should not be able to install printer drivers (or any for that matter, I'm certain). In XP because the domain controller said the printer driver was ok XP would let users install that driver. At any rate there is a setting that you can use in Group Policies that will allow users to install a certain set of drivers (printer, sound, video, etc.). The only problem with that is when a user logs in and the script assigns them the printers they are asked if they want to install the driver. I would like to not have to have the user click the "install driver" button. In XP that was all handled in the background. I know that I can set a policy for the printers, but I would prefer not to setup ~20 policies for printers. I guess I'll keep working on that one.

Adobe CS3. You know, I am getting to the point that I am not very happy with Adobe these days. Their installer is just a pain to use, and it does not really help you out where there is an error. On my test machine all the times that I installed CS3 it just worked. When we deployed on Monday we were getting errors from the CS3 installer. Come to find out that CS3 will not install on a machine that has the resolution set to 800x600. When Vista first started installing the resolution was set to 1024x768. During the windows update phase newer drivers would get installed and by default the resolution in those drivers are set to 800x600. So after some searching I found a little command line tool that I could use to get the resolution changed to 1024x768. Since I'm on holiday I'll have to write about that a little later will all the details.

User error. I made several stupid mistakes. I forgot a program that we needed to install. Then when I added it into the applications list I fat fingered it. WooHoo for being prepared. I also had an application that I added into the applications list and copied the command line to have the correct syntax, but then I did not change the filename. I also did not test my application keying well enough and MS Access would crater because it was keyed. WooHoo for paying attention.

Drivers. I found out that you may need to add in some drivers to your driver store in the middle of the build process. I am so thankful that we are using MDT and not our old way of sysprep/ghost/deploy. I was able to make a lot of changes and add drivers in about 30 min and keep deploying. Our old way would have taken half a day just to add in the sound drivers that windows update did not have.

The power also went out in the machine room in the middle of our deployment. That caused all sorts of frustration. Since I use scripts that move machines around to different OUs during the build process I had to go back and put them in the correct place so we could start the builds again once the server came back up.

Did things go as well as I wanted? NO. Did things go well. Yep I think they went pretty well. Just somethings to think of when you start to do your deployment testing.