I’ve never really understood why uninstalling programs in Safe Mode isn’t officially supported in Windows. The main purpose of Safe Mode is to troubleshoot Windows, and what usually causes the trouble? Right, misbehaving programs. This may not even be the fault of the program itself. Windows is a very complex system and sometimes unforeseeable things happen. If an application has been somehow damaged, it might not even be possible to uninstall it. For example, its service could hang immediately after the system boots, or other programs could interfere.

In Safe Mode, Windows has reduced functionality, because only the core components have been loaded. In such an environment it is much easier to get rid of an application that has gone mad. Windows Safe Mode can be entered by pressing the F8 key before Windows boots up.

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In my last post I reviewed Admin Arsenal’s inventory and monitoring features. Today I will show you how you can use this nifty tool to deploy software and manage computers remotely.

Software deployment is fairly easy with Admin Arsenal. You just have to select a collection and choose the MSI, MSU, or EXE file. It is also possible to remotely install software on a single computer or multiple computers by selecting each computer separately. Admin Arsenal supports unattended installations, you can uninstall or repair software, and it is possible to restart computers after an installation, if necessary. All prior remote installations are listed in the deployment interface.

Admin Arsenal starts immediately with the installation on all selected computers, which means there will be no delays, as you might know from enterprise software deployment solutions. The installation will fail if a computer isn’t online. Admin Arsenal won’t try again later; thus you must ensure that all machines are reachable before you start the deployment process. Because Admin Arsenal supports Wake on LAN, this shouldn’t be a problem for small and mid-sized networks.

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In my last article I introduced Admin Arsenal, Brisworks’ system management tool for small and mid-sized businesses. Today I will describe its components, i.e., hardware and software inventory, software deployment, and monitoring, in detail.

Admin Arsenal organizes computer objects in collections. There are two types of collections, static and dynamic. A static collection is populated manually, i.e., you can just drag computer objects to the corresponding folder. A dynamic collection is based on criteria you configure and is populated automatically whenever you access its folder. Criteria can be combined and use almost any hardware or software property. For example, you can configure a collection that contains all Windows XP SP3 machines using a shared printer. Collections can be organized in folders and subfolders, allowing you to create a hierarchy of computer property-based containers.

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Admin Arsenal is an affordable systems management and monitoring solution for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Its publisher, Brisworks, raffles five free licenses, each worth $399, for 4sysops readers. Admin Arsenal isn’t licensed per client machine as many other system management tools are; you just need a license for every administrator who will use the tool. I tested Admin Arsenal and was surprised at how easy systems management can be. I could start working immediately without even consulting the manual.

Admin Arsenal offers the most important systems management functions: software and hardware inventory, software deployment, and remote management. Furthermore, it has essential monitoring features such as performance counters and event log monitoring. It doesn’t support OS deployment or patch management; however, considering that Microsoft offers two “free” SMB tools for this purpose, i.e., Windows Deployment Services (WDS) and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), this is not really a shortcoming.

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This is the fourth post in my series about application virtualization. One of the products I listed in my last post was Xenocode Virtual Application Studio. Since then, I’ve tested this tool and was a bit surprised how easy it is to handle.

However, my first attempt to install the tool failed. The MSIInstaller complained that “C:\Program Files\Common Files\ODBC\Data Sources\” was missing. It was a Vista machine and so I thought it was a compatibility issue. Installation under Windows XP was done in a less than a minute. A few days later I tried it again on the same Vista PC and that time, the installation ran through without problems.

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This post is the first in a series in which I will explore the advantages, the disadvantages, and the essential features of application virtualization solutions. I will also review some products which will make you realize how different the approaches to application virtualization are. You’ll find the links to all articles in this series at the end of each post. German speaking readers might also be interested in my introduction to application virtualization in the magazine Computerwoche.

Wikipedia defines it application virtualization as “an umbrella term that describes technologies that improve application compatibility and manageability by encapsulating applications from the underlying operating system on which they are executed.” The main idea is to run programs in a virtualized environment on a desktop system.

The difference between hardware virtualization solutions, such as VMware Workstation or Virtual PC, and application virtualization is that in the latter case the underlying operating system, the host if you will, is executing the program. But it seems to me that there is no clear dividing line between the different virtualization solutions. For example, you could say that Vista supports application virtualization as well, because it can virtualize folder structures and the registry for legacy apps. Hence the virtualization solutions differ only with respect to the objects they virtualize. Some virtualize a full-blown computer and others only the programs folder.

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I wonder how many different names this tool kit already had. Just some months ago, Microsoft renamed Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007 into Microsoft Deployment 4. The name of the new version, which was released today, is Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2008. I guess many got confused by the former name because they thought it would be another deployment tool which is not the case. MDT is indeed just a tool kit, but one that is delivered without the tools. That means you have to download the tools you need for your work. The new version has quite a few new features.

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Microsoft just released a new version of their IE7 deployment paper. The document has 156 pages. So you can imagine that IE7 deployment can get tricky. However, for the experienced admin many of the things discussed in it will be quite familiar. Nevertheless, it might be a useful reference if you run into problems. The other question is if you need to deploy IE7 if you haven’t done it yet.

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Microsoft published the Internet Explorer 7 Deployment Guide, a 67 page Word document, discussing how to plan and carry out IE7 deployment. I just skimmed over the document, but it seems to me that more things have to be considered than what I thought before.

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Before I was just upset by these concentration destroying UAC pop-ups. When I played these past days with the OS Deployment Feature Pack of SMS 2003 SP2 and Vista, I encountered a new “nice feature” of UAC. If you are a sysop, you’ll probably have a lot of fun with this in the near future.

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TrackWinstall is a free tool that informs you about the changes a setup program made to your Windows installation. It shows you what files where added or removed and which files were changed by the setup program. It also lists all Registry changes.

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FLEXnet AdminStudio is a MSI packaging solution from Macrovision (formerly InstallShield). There is a Standard, Professional, and an Enterprise Edition. All three are commercial versions, but the limited SMS Edition is free. I believe it is sponsored by Microsoft, as they offer it on their Web site. However, even if you don’t have Systems Management Server, you can still work with the FLEXnet AdminStudio SMS Edition to create MSI packages. I tried it and was quite content with it.

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MSI (Microsoft Installer) is, meanwhile, the de-facto standard for installing Windows programs. It is advisable to only use this format in order to keep the Windows Installer database of installed products consistent. If your software deployment solution doesn’t allow you to create MSI files, you have to use a third party tool. Usually, these tools are called MSI packagers. Sometimes you’ll also find “MSI repackagers” since they are used to re-create the original installation package. This post lists several MSI packagers.

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According to Microsoft, you can apply a Windows Vista image to PCs with different Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). You only need different images for computers with 32 bit and 64 bit CPUs. This sounds like a revolution for Windows imaging and deployment. So I was quite curious to try this killer feature of Windows Vista.

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Windows Deployment Services (WDS) is the successor of Remote Installation Services (RIS), and can be used to deploy Windows Vista and older Windows versions. In this review I’ll be discussing the experiences I had with WDS.

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