I would like to automate the process of setting up a new PC, this would include downloading and installing the latest windows and office updates; installing software from a network share (some software will require a restart so the script would need to be able to login and continue) adding PC to a domain and setting up local user accounts.
Is this possible and what would be the best scripting language to achieve this?
Check out nLite. Allows you to pre-configure many options, slipstream updates and service packs, etc.
The standard method in enterprise IT is the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT). Even if another OS deployment technique (SCCM, BigFix, SpecOps...) is used, the Windows images are often developed in MDT.
There is no better guide to getting started than Johan Arwidmark's book series "Deployment Fundamentals". There is also material at Windows Noob.
You could integrate Chocolatey, BoxStarter or Ninite for app management after the OS is deployed.
Related
Downloaded source package of DotnetNuke and I am new in dotnetNuke. Can anyone help me to clarify the process of installing DotnetNuke.
I am following this Install DNN
I've got a tutorial on installing DNN8 found here.
You can also follow this text tutorial
Setting up your development environment can vary based on what your
end goal is. If you are doing module development for your own use, and
within your own DNN environments, you can ignore a few of the settings
below. If you are doing module development with the idea that you
might turn around and give the modules away, or sell them, then you
will likely want to follow the guidelines set forth below to support
the widest array of DNN installation environments.
I recommend that each developer have their own local development
environment, with a local IIS website running DotNetNuke, and a SQL
Server 2008/2012 (not express, though you can use it) database for the
website. Having an individual development environment makes group
module development far easier than if you share
environments/databases.
Choosing a DotNetNuke Version Choosing a version of DotNetNuke is
important when you start your development for couple of reasons. For
modules that you are developing for yourself, you need to ask, what is
the minimum version of DotNetNuke that you have in production. Are you
running DNN 5.6.1? Are you running 6.2.6, 7.0.0, 7.0.6? Based on the
answer you can determine what version of DNN you should setup as your
development environment. You shouldn't be developing on a newer
version of DNN than what you have running in production. As with
everything there are ways around this, but I am not going to go into
the details on that in this tutorial.
As a developer working to create modules and release those, you might
have production sites that are running on the latest and greatest
version of DNN, but what about your customers? Or your potential
customers? You have to ask yourself, do you want to provide support
for really old versions of DotNetNuke? From a development perspective
you will probably say no, but from a business perspective, you might
say yes, and here’s why. Not everyone upgrades DotNetNuke websites as
they should, and often times you will find that some people never
upgrade. While I don’t advise taking that approach to managing a
DotNetNuke website, it is a fact of life that people don’t always
upgrade and there are thousands of people, if not tens of thousands,
that have sites that aren’t running on the latest version of DNN. You
should take that into account when you are doing your module
development, if you compile your module against an older version of
DNN then your module should run on newer versions of as well, for
example. If you compile your module against DotNetNuke 6.2.6 it will
likely run on every version of DNN released since then. Though there
are extended cases where this won’t always work, DNN strives to
maintain backwards compatibility, this isn't always possible.
You might also want to use features that are only available starting
with a specific version of DotNetNuke, such as the workflow
functionality found starting in DNN 5.1, in that case you may choose
not to support older versions of the platform out of necessity. This
will minimize the market in which you can sell your modules, but also
can make for less support and an easier development cycle due to the
features that DNN provides.
Choosing a Package Now here’s one that may baffle you a bit. I’m going
to recommend that you use the INSTALL package for whatever version of
DotNetNuke that you download. What? The INSTALL package? What about
the SOURCE package? Well you can use the source, but you don’t need
it. The module development that I’m setting you up for doesn't require
the DNN source, and using the INSTALL package makes your development
environment cleaner. We aren't going to be opening the DotNetNuke
project when we do our module development, so why have the files
sitting around for nothing? Also, if you've ever tried to use the
SOURCE package for anything, you'll know it isn't easy.
The steps for setting up your development environment will apply to
both the Community and Professional editions of DotNetNuke.
Installation Configuration Once you have the version selection out of
the way you can go through the installation process. While I’m not
going to walk you through the minutest of details of each step of
installing DotNetNuke in this post, I will at least try to point you
in the right direction for each step.
Download the INSTALL package of the version of DotNetNuke you want to
use in your development environment.
Extract the files in the INSTALL package to a location of your
choosing, this location is where you will point IIS (the web server)
when we can configure the website. In my environment I typically use
c:\websites\dnndev.me\ (One item of note: you may need to right click
on the ZIP file and choose Properties before extracting, on the
properties window if you have an UNBLOCK option, click that. Some
versions of Windows have started blocking files within the DotNetNuke
ZIP files, which will cause you problems later during the actual
install.)
Setup IIS IIS is the web server that comes with Windows computers. DNN
7 requires IIS 7 or later (7,7.5,8.0), so you will need at least
Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows Server 2008 R2,
Windows Server 2012.
In IIS you should create a new website (Note: If you use an existing
website in IIS be sure to add the HOST binding for DNNDEV.ME), and
point to the folder where you extracted the INSTALL package.
Note: With DotNetNuke 7.0+, .NET Framework 4.0 is required, so be sure
that your application pool is configured to run under 4.0, and not
2.0.
Set File Permissions Setting up the file permissions for your DNN
install is often the step that causes the most trouble. You should
right click on the FOLDER in which you extracted DNN
(c:\websites\dnndev.me) and choose properties. Choose the Security
tab. You need to add permissions for the account in which your
website's application pool is running under. You will want to setup
the permissions to give the account Full or Modify permissions for the
DNNDEV.ME folder. Which account you will use will vary based on your
version of IIS, here’s a simple list of some of the default accounts
based on the version of IIS.
IIS Version Operating System Account IIS 7 Windows Vista, Windows
Server 2008 localmachine\Network Service IIS 7.5 Windows 2008 R2,
Windows 7 IIS AppPool\APPPOOLNAME IIS 8 Windows 2012, Windows 8 IIS
AppPool\APPPOOLNAME
Note: If you are using IIS7.5/8.0 you’ll notice in the above table
that we have APPPOOLNAME in the identity, this is because when you
setup a new website in IIS a new application pool is created. In place
of you should type in the name of the application pool that was
created. You can also bypass this and configure your application pool
to use the Network Service account instead of a dynamic account if you
would like.
Database Configuration In SQL Server you should go through and create
a new database. I always create a database with the same name as the
website, so in this case DNNDEV.ME. Once you have created the
database, create a user that can access that database. I always use
SQL authentication, turn off the enforce password requirements, and
give the user DB Owner and Public access to the DNNDEV.ME database.
Remember the username and password you create here as you will need
them when you walk through the Installation screen for DotNetNuke.
DotNetNuke Installation Screen Populate the installation screen with
the standard DNN information, Host username, password, etc. For the
Database option, choose Custom and configure your database connection,
providing the Server IP/Name, the Database name (dnndev.me). For the
database authentication you'll want to choose the option that allows
you to enter the username/password for the database user that you
created previously.
Now there are two additional options you can configure, normally I
would tell you not to modify these, but from a development environment
perspective I do recommend that you change the objectQualifier
setting. It should be blank by default, you should type in “dnn”
(without quotes), this will prepend “dnn_” to all of the objects that
get created by DNN such as Tables and Stored Procedures. This is not
something I recommend from a production stand point, but if you are
developing modules for sale, then supporting objectQualifier in your
development is recommended. It will save you time down the road if you
have a customer who has an objectQualifier defined on their production
databases.
Follow the following video and it has total two parts one and two part links are givenbelow
Part one
Part two
I work at a software company,
And we have a product for Windows OS that is installed using a custom installer.
We want to have an automated system that will run the installer on a daily basis, make sure that everything is installed and functional (application installed, appears in Add/Remove, shortcut created, registry keys created, browser addons installed, etc)
I also want to test the functionality of the app by using a GUI macro of some sort.
Is there anything like what i'm looking for?
We ended up using TestComplete 9 from SmartBear: https://smartbear.com
Its doing exactly what we need, and it has many advanced features like connecting to remote virtual computers for parallel testing.
Trying to install Redmine on Windows 8 on this tutorial. Getting this errors:
Tried Bitnami's installer too, but I already have IIS Web Server and don't need the bundled Apache webserver. The installer doesn't give me to choose it's components. It installs Apache by default. So, Bitnami's Redmine is not for me.
What am I missing?
Is there any other good bug & request tracking software? Please don't Google and advise me to some random results. Advise something that you used and really good as Redmine
Once you get the error above, make sure that new WebSite's AppPool has write access to site's folder on the harddrive to complete the install process.
Then open the website in a browser and the installation will complete.
Set security accordingly after the install completes.
Use WebIssues multi-platform bug & request tracking software that fits all your needs instead of Redmine.
WebIssues is an open source, multi-platform system for issue tracking and team collaboration. It can be used to store, share and track issues with various attributes, comments and file attachments. It is easy to install and use but has many capabilities and is highly customizable.
Main features:
The Desktop Client application can run natively on Windows, Linux
and OS X
The Web Client can be used to access the system using a web browser
The server can be installed on any host with PHP 5.2 or newer and
MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQL Server
Issues can be filtered using public and personal views with
configurable filtering criteria
Email notifications can be sent and the Desktop CLient can
periodically check for new and modified issues meeting various
criteria
Various reports can be printed directly from the Desktop Client or
exported as HTML and PDF documents
Is there anyone out there that can share experiences with the various flavours of running svnserve on Windows. I'm using it mainly for a small hobby project that I share with friends, so it will run on my desktop.
Using the Collabnet Subversion Edge seems a bit heavy weight. Any drawbacks in just run 'svnserve'? I recently found VisualSVNserver which seems to add some easy administrative functions.
I have good experience with VisualSVN server, very easy to set up and configure user accounts.
It is also very easy to upgrade, just run the latest installer and you're done.
With VisualSVN you can run HTTPS with a self signed certificate. If you just run svnserve you're left without encryption and that is not recommended if you plan to access your server from the internet.
Keep in mind that whatever solution you choose they all use standard svn as the backend and you can easily move your repositories from one solution to another.
If you plan to make your project open source you can host your code at sourceforge or codeplex.
I have decided to go with Subversion for a source control repository for my personal and side projects and I'm now trying to decide what OS to use. Currently my file server for my home network is Windows 7 beta. I'm wondering if I should wipe it and install Windows Server 2008 instead? Basically I'd like to know if there are things I could take advantage with a server OS that I can't with Windows 7. First thing that comes to mind is accessing subversion remotely with a VPN connection.
I'm a .net developer, but have dabbled in Linux a bit so I'm not completely turned off to the idea of an ubuntu or debian server...
I imagine the installation and configuration process might go off with fewer hitches if installed on Linux, just because of the package management, but that's assuming some experience with the package system of $whatever_distro. If you're comfortable with Windows, Subversion works perfectly well on there. I've set it up on both, but prefer the Linux installation process (easier Apache integration, in my view), but I had pre-existing Linux experience.
If you're familiar with Windows, I bet you'll find the installation and configuration process easier there. As others have said, many of the tools are cross-platform.
You can run a Subversion server on Windows or Linux (or whatever) so it really doesn't matter. Pick whichever one you already have and feel most comfortable with. Since you are a Windows developer I see no real reason to toss Linux into the mix though.
If your goal is to minimize the amount of work you put into the maintenance of subversion, go with the OS you are most comfortable with. Many maintenance scripts, and subversion hooks are written and available in perl and python which are available for both windows and linux.
One advantage to the Windows server OSes over their client counterparts is that the client OSes are limited as to the number of inbound connections. If you are going to be the only person working on the repo, this may not make a difference. However, if there are multiple people, then this would be an issue. XP Pro/Vista Ultimate are limited by Microsoft to 10 inbound connections. I cannot speak for Windows 7.
To make life easy, try VisualSVN Server. For personal projects there's no reason to setup a separate server just for SVN.
Windows 7 will be able to host Subversion with no problems whatsoever..
If your file-server is already setup and working under Windows 7, I'd say stick with that.. Adding SVN is no reason to install a new OS
You don't need a server at all to use subversion.
If you've already got a file server on your home network, and you're doing this only for you and your personal projects, just use a subversion client such as TortoiseSVN and create your repository (or repositories) on your file server via network share (or mapped network drive, etc).
I wouldn't recommend this for multi-user setups (unless each has their own repository), but for a single user this is the simplest option. And using this approach, to answer your question, you wouldn't gain anything by switching to a server OS such as Windows Server 2008.
I'd actually recommend going with a hosted Subversion provider instead of setting up Subversion on Windows or getting a second server for that purpose. I work for ProjectLocker, but if you Google "subversion hosting", you'll see there are a number of providers that offer free or reasonably priced solutions. The advantages:
It's a hosting provider's primary job to keep your code safe, secure, and accessible, so they focus on uptime, backups, and security monitoring so you don't have to
You don't have to learn how to be a system administrator or Subversion administrator; several providers have user interfaces that make it easy to manage users and permissions.
Hosting instead of DIY lets you focus on what you actually care about: writing great software
I suggest you take a look at ProjectLocker and some of the other providers and decide which one is right for you. You may decide that doing it yourself is the best option for you, but for many people in your situation, a hosted solution has met their needs.