Month: June 2011

Speeding up LAN based Automation OS boot times using a Custom TFTP Server for Altiris (for WinPE and Linux)

John 1 Comment

One of the more easier ways of speeding up your WinPE boot times via PXE are changing the default TFTP server which comes with Altiris. First of all, open up the PXE Configuration Manager and disable Multicast since the WinPE image cannot be transferred over Multicast anyway(only DOS supports Multicast via TFTP). This simple tweak shaves around a second off your PXE Boot time.

Another tweak which can be performed is changing the TFTP Server itself. This sounds quite difficult but is quite easy to accomplish and is a significant benefit.  My own testing has shown that 10 Clients concurrently loading a WinPE image do it around 45-50% faster using another TFTP Server than if I was to continue using Altiris’s own server.

I was also going to cover compressing the WinPE image to reduce its file size, but found thatwhen doing so, the reduction in size was minimal shaving off around 10mb.

I’ll be using the Open Source Open TFTP Server, available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tftp-server/. Download it and install it either on your Altiris Server or like I did, on my workstation and then copy it over to your server. You will also need to copy over your Settings file.

Firstly, open up the Services control applet and Stop the Altiris PXE MTFTP Server service.

Now comes the good part. Open an elevated command prompt. The following is based on our Altiris setup, with it installed on D drive and me creating a folder under PXE for OpenTFTP and pasting the OpenTFTP executable and Settings file into that folder.

sc config "Altiris PXE MTFTP Server" binpath= "D:\Deployment Server\PXE\OpenTFTP\OpenTFTPServerMT.exe"

That will reconfigure the MTFTP service path that Altiris uses to push out files from the Altiris supplied MTFTP to our Open TFTP server. You can go into the Services control applet and start the Altiris MTFTP service to begin using the new executable.

To try and get the most out of OpenTFTP server, have a play with the Settings file, primarly the blksize option. Ours is set to 1456 and can be changed depending on your network environment.

If for any chance you want to return to the Altiris MTFTP server then you simply need to run the sc config command pointing to your Altiris PXE MTFTP executable so stop the service again and enter the following into an elevated command prompt making sure to match the path to your Altiris location:

sc config "Altiris PXE MTFTP Server" binpath= "D:\Deployment server\PXE\PxeMtftp.exe"

Then start the service again and you are back to using the default Altiris multi-thread TFTP server.

This simple tweak shaves heaps of time off of WinPE (also Linux) automation boot times. If you are running the Dos based automation then there isn’t really a need to run this tweak as the transfer is small enough not to take long anyway.

Hope that helps.

How to set (and change) an NTP time source in Windows Server 2008 R2 (SBS 2011 and Vanilla Server).

John 17 Comments

Recently, the clocks on my home networked PCs began drifting off sync until the difference was around 30 minutes. At first i thought that my SBS server was no longer synching with time.windows.com (the default time server for windows). After a quick look at the event log, I could see that it was syncing correctly and that the date and timezone were correct. So I began to look at how I could change the NTP server that Windows was syncing with. Unlike Windows XP, which had a tab were you could set the source and even add your own in the date and time control panel applet, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 have nothing of the sort, so how was I going to change the source. A quick look on technet led me to an article titled Windows Time Services Tools and Settings.

To query the time service about its current status open up an elevated command prompt and type in:
w32tm /query /status

This will display the following output (it will either state Source: Local CMOS Clock or time.windows.com)

After working out the souce and that it was synching without error as well as the obvious the fact the time was way off I needed to find a reliable Time service. After a bit of searching around the web I found pool.ntp.org which is the part of the home for the Network Time Protocol open source project (ntp.org). Members work together to provide a public pool of time servers for use by individuals and businesses. pool.ntp.org uses DNS round robin to make a random selection from a pool of time servers who have volunteered to be in the pool making this service highly redundant and reliable.

If you navigate to the Time Servers page on their wiki you will see a list of servers as rell as regional servers which you can also choose from.  Since I’m in Australia I narrowed it down to Oceanaia and then Australia leaving me with au.pool.ntp.org.  So basically I now had to reconfigure the Windows Time service to sync with the NTP Australian Server Pool. A quick look over the technet documentation told me the commands I needed to run which was:
w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:au.pool.ntp.org

Which after being executed in an elevated command prompt will leave you with command completed successfully.  Once that is configured we need to restart the time service by either doing net stop/start w32time or via the Services Control Panel on Windows Time.

You can then query the time service again using /query and /status which will present you with the above output. As you can see the time service is now synching with the service that I specified it to. You can look around the NTP site to find a group of services which are closer to your location, but it generally doesn’t matter where you pick the NTP server from.

And there you have it, how to reconfigure the Windows Time service to look at a different time source.  As a side note before closing off the article, Microsoft don’t fully support the Windows 32 Time service for use in high accuracy environments as mentioned in this Knowledge base article. So if you need something which is highly accurate then you need to look elsewhere.

Assigning resources via logon script based on computer names.

John Leave a comment

We’ve recently been having an issue where printers being deployed via group policy haven’t been deploying, or are deploying but not being set to default.  So after some investigation, the easiest thing to do would be to write a Visual basic script to ease the deployment of printers throughout our environment. Luckily for us we have naming conventions and machines are usually called 2011uname or 2014uname, based on a student’s final year.

You can use this script for all sorts of things, from allocating printers and mapping network drives. To increase or decrease the amount of characters that the script looks at simply modify the strLength (Define String Check Length) variable at the beginning of the script.

'Actions based on Computer name for logon scripts
'Define String Check Length
strLength = "4"

'Get the computer name
Set WSHNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")
strComputer = WSHNetwork.ComputerName

'Select year level by ending year
Select Case Left(strComputer,strLength)
    Case "2011"
        msgbox "year 12"
    Case "2012"
        msgbox "year 11"
    Case "2013"
        msgbox "year 10"
End Select

The script will print out a message box, but within the case you can specify what ever action you want. Hope that helps someone out.