I call it Remote View…

How many times has someone come up and asked “I’m having a problem with <insert device here>.”  Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to know what processes or services are running right now?  Who’s logged in, when it was last booted, what’s installed, and other things?  Wouldn’t also be great to get all that information in real-time?  I got a call from a support person once who claimed a process was “hung” and he wanted to kill it.  I told him to wait and used the tool to watch the running processes from my desk.  I watched the process exit and told him “ok it’s done, you should be fine.”  He started to say “how do you know it’s…..  Oh wait its gone.  It’s done.  How’d you know that?”  Of course my answer was “its magic”.  All I did was watch the process in question and watched the memory usage change, as I watched it go down I was then able to see the process disappear from the list.  MAGIC!!!

I got sick and tired of people asking for help, but giving zero information.  So I wrote a series of scripts to get information, general info (make, model, etc), installed apps, patches, etc.  You know the “normal” things.  I then got tired of using the individual scripts and thought it’d be really cool to put everything in one console.  So I did. 

I’ve been working on and off on a project I call Remote View for a while.  I have a 1.0 version that works, but me being me, wanted to make it better.  It started as a HTA with an Excel object, I wouldn’t even call that one 1.0.  That was better than a bunch of scripts, but I had a friend test it from a remote site and the performance wasn’t as good as I wanted for him.  So I moved to VB.  The performance was much better.   Then I was able to re-write almost all the code from being WMI queries or other methods to straight VB.NET code and the performance got even better.  Plus I was able to add functions that I had issues with before or didn’t even have before.  That’s where it stood for a while.  I still thought it could be better though.  That’s when I decided that to really get what I wanted I needed to do another big re-write. 

The new version, that I’m still working on, has some I think cool features:

• It’s multithreaded, no more “UI lockup” while processing.  Plus now you can cancel a query if you want before it finishes.  Plus a little progress bar to let you know something is still happening.
• The way connection / computer history is done it’s totally different.  I can now even add notes about a computer in the history.  That makes it much easier to remember why it’s in my history.
• Gathering user information has been totally redone and much faster.
• Gathering service information has been totally redone.  It’s faster and gathers more information.

It’s still a work in progress, but I’m pretty happy with it so far.  The one question I’m still struggling with is Event Log information.  I currently have it setup to select a date from a picker and then it grabs all events from that date until now.  I’ve also had it so it only grab logs from that exact date.  Which do you think is better?  I lean towards more information as long as the performance it’s totally trashed.  I’ve attached some pictures of it from its early HTA days until today.  Any comments or ideas are always welcome.  Keep in mind I’m not a developer, I’m just a guy  teaching myself VB in my free time…

 

PS…  I’ve also writen a GUI for USMT and a crude how to find the owner by number of logins app that I may post info about in the future….

This was the original version in HTA form.

The VB.NET 1.0 Version

The new working 2.0 version General Information screen

The new working 2.0 version Installed Apps screen

The new working 2.0 version User Info screen

The new working 2.0 version Installed Patches screen

The new working 2.0 version Process Information screen

The new working 2.0 version Service Information screen

The new working 2.0 version Startup Information screen

MDT 2010 & VM Player 3 Beta

So I’ve been playing with MDT 2010 for a little while now.  I have to say I like the changes.  I really like the new sub folder options and the profile’s idea is an interesting one.  I was able to setup two totally independent distribution points, one for server & one for workstation, and Server 2008 and Windows 7 unattended builds up and running in no time.  I separated them really for no technical reason, just a to do it thing.  Although it is kind of nice to have them separate but in the same console.   I also created separate media points for both too, makes creating VM’s quick and easy.  Everything is on the .ISO and no network traffic.   Gotta love: boot from a disk, enter a user name / password, give it a name and walk away.  Full media is even better, boot from a disk, give it a name, walk away. 

Speaking of VM’s.  I’ve traditionally been a VMWare guy, but have been forced to use VPC for the last 8 months.  VPC wasn’t as bad as I thought, I really miss multiple snapshots, virtual networks, and teams though.  You can do snapshots in VPC but it’s a manual process and pain to do, VPC on Windows 7 is starting to move in a good direction.  Finally USB support welcome to 2009.  I heard about VMWare Player 3 Beta and decided to check it out.  It’s basically VMWare’s answer to VPC, you can now create VM’s and multiple monitor support (which I was really surprised worked well it was just like a physical PC doing dual monitors no lag for me).  I really wish we’d get the ability for 1 snapshot though.  I understand not including teams and multiple snapshots because then why pay for workstation, but limited snapshots would be great.

My first blog….

This is my first blog ever, very exciting.  In the future I’ll be posting tech stuff on MDT 2008/2010 (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit), Windows 7 (and probably XP I guess), maybe some Server 2008 deployment, maybe SCCM, scripting (VBS, starting on PowerShell, VB.NET), and whatever else I want.  Feel free to leave comments…..