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Download and install latest Office 365 via Office Deployment Tool (ODT)

Inspired by Trond Eric Haavarstein’s evergreen PowerShell setup scripts, I created a download and install script for Office 365 Deployment Tool (ODT).

Microsoft Office 365 is the new standard in the EUC space right now. To honor this, we need a fast and reliable way to install it with our favorite deployment tools like MDT or PDQ,  for example when you rebuild your master images.

There are a few different ways to deploy Office 365, but they are all similar:

  • You need the Office 365 Click-to-run setup.exe (Office Deployment Tool (ODT))
  • You need a XML configuration file
  • You decide to deploy from a pre-build offline cache or the files are downloaded from Microsoft each and every time

And then you go: setup.exe /configure configuration.xml

Pretty straight forward you think, but non the less I had problems with this approach. And this is due to the fact, that the Office Deployment Tool itself gets updated pretty often. And this breaks your unattended deployments sooner or later, as the setup.exe stops working. Continue reading “Download and install latest Office 365 via Office Deployment Tool (ODT)”

Zabbix Linux vfs User parameter Templates

Zabbix monitoring offers several virtual file system item types out of the box. But there are still some missing. I created a GitHup Repository to provide some additional items as User parameter.

During my daily work I was tasked with two additional values, Zabbix should provide to our Administrators:

  • Were Linux configuration files from a certain installed daemon modified? (/etc/postfix/)
  • What is the timestamp of the oldest file in a certain directory? (EDI)

In both cases, the affected machines are Debian Linux virtual machines with Zabbix agent 3.4+ installed and configured. Zabbix offers no way to solve these challenges out of the box, but is easily customizable via User Parameter and custom Low Level Discovery to add this features. Continue reading “Zabbix Linux vfs User parameter Templates”

Download and install latest Tablacus Explorer

In all of my current EUC deployments, I install Tablacus Explorer as an alternative to explorer.exe for use as a published application. This is an evergreen PowerShell script, that downloads and installs the latest version.

In one of my past articles I presented Tablacus Explorer as an replacement for explorer.exe in Citrix Virtual Apps und Desktops (formerly XenApp) as a published application. With automation more and more being mandatory in IT projects, I needed a way to install Tablacus Explorer evergreen with PowerShell each and every time I deploy it to Windows Clients, RDSH, Citrix virtual apps or desktops or in MDT Task sequences. Once again I used one of Trond Eric Haavarstein example scripts and altered it to fit my needs. Here are the results. Continue reading “Download and install latest Tablacus Explorer”

HowTo: Publish the classic Printers folder in Citrix virtual Apps and Desktops

Starting with Windows Server 2012 R2 Citrix Administrators have to face the problem, that the new Device And Printers view doesn’t work as expected. Connected network printers are invisible. To face that issue, it is a valid workaround to publish the classic Printers Folder.

Starting with Windows Server 2012 R2 Citrix Administrators have to face the problem, that the new Device And Printers view doesn’t work as expected. Connected network printers are often not visible, or to bring it on point: Invisible to the end user. There are several sources on the internet, that describe this pain, for example:

To face that issue, it is a valid workaround to publish the classic Printers Folder known from Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, to your end users. In this view, the problem with the invisible printers doesn’t exit. Additionally we give the users the possibility to get access to the session network printer mapping and the default printer settings.

Continue reading “HowTo: Publish the classic Printers folder in Citrix virtual Apps and Desktops”

Installing the Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server on Debian Linux with Saltstack

Installing the Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server on Debian Linux (msodbcsql17) with Saltstack requires to pass ACCEPT_EULA=Y to the package manager. This blog post shows a possible solution.

Introduction

Microsoft offers several open source utilities for quite some time now. One is the Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server on Linux which can be leveraged with unixodbc. In my case, I need this driver to query Microsoft SQL Server for my Zabbix ODBC monitoring, to execute native SQL queries for monitoring purposes. As I have to take control over 30+ Zabbix Proxies, I’m currently transforming all of them into Salt minions. My goal here is to achieve 100% automation, as soon as I install the Salt minion on a fresh Debian Linux. Continue reading “Installing the Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server on Debian Linux with Saltstack”