Ah, I just read the blog and saw that....

At a past company, we ran into the same mess in our testing. I wonder if this 
is on MS's radar at all...

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-----Original Message-----
From: Koster, Maik [[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>]
Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2013 09:28 AM Central Standard Time
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [mssms] ConfigMgr 2012 meets tablets - The case of the "Unknown"

That’s what I did. I based it on the Mac address of the devices used for 
deployment and restricted it to media and PXE only. Then having an 
advertisement against that collection which runs the DDR and hardware inventory 
to update the resource and get it out of the collection again. This way it 
doesn’t interfere with the deployments and also doesn’t affect running clients. 
Just wanted to raise this to see, if there are other, maybe better solutions ;-)

Regards
Maik Koster
Cameron Flow Control Technology GmbH - Sitz der Gesellschaft: Celle - 
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Lüneburg HRB 204184 - Geschäftsführung: Cheryl 
Roberts, Grace Holmes

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Dzikowski, Michael
Sent: Dienstag, 3. September 2013 16:17
To: '[email protected]'; '[email protected]'
Subject: RE: [mssms] ConfigMgr 2012 meets tablets - The case of the "Unknown"

Could you directly advertise your OS deployment to a query based tablets 
collection, and just hide the advertisement from configmgr clients? Just make 
your OS deployment visible to pxe and media?

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-----Original Message-----
From: Koster, Maik [[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>]
Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2013 05:35 AM Central Standard Time
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: [mssms] ConfigMgr 2012 meets tablets - The case of the "Unknown"


I’d like to start a small discussion on an issue I ran into recently.

The full story can be found here: 
http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/maikkoster/archive/2013/09/03/configmgr-2012-sp1-meets-tablets-the-case-of-the-unknown.aspx

To give a short abstract.

We had to deploy Windows 8 to some tablets using ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 and used a 
Task Sequence deployed to the “Unknown Computers” collection. The tablets we 
had for testing didn’t have any built-in NIC, so we used a USB-To-Ethernet 
dongle and a docking station. First deployment(s) ran fine, but on the second 
device (using the same dongle, as the first device doesn’t need it because it’s 
 being used wireless) it didn’t start the Task Sequence as it was no longer 
unknown. The first device had the Mac Address assigned, so if ConfigMgr queries 
for devices based on MAC and UUID, it will find a resource based on the Mac (of 
the dongle) and not handle it as an unknown computer.

We forwarded this information to Microsoft and the response was, to buy a 
dongle/docking station per device. Which is not only a cost-intensive solution, 
it will most likely also not work on the long run, as I would guess most 
support staff doesn’t really unpack and connect a dongle/docking station per 
deployment, rather having a few “stations” prepared to do the deployments and 
then just hand out the still boxed dongle/docking station to the user. At least 
that’s how most of our deployments are done internally.

So we tried to get it working with a few dongles/docking stations only. But we 
didn’t wanted to deploy this to a large collection like all systems and we also 
didn’t wanted to pre-stage each single tablet. So we created a collection based 
on the Mac Addresses of the Dongles and docking stations we used for this 
initial deployment and restricted the deployment of the TS to media and PXE 
only. This prevented the deployment to be shown in the Software center of 
already deployed devices. However, all the “old” tablets were still shown in 
this collection and would stay in there, until this entry ages out.

After some testing on how to get rid of this information as soon as possible, 
we figured out, that we had to update the DDR and then force a full hardware 
inventory, to get this done. So we advertised a package with a batch that 
executes two WMIC commands (show in the blog post). This has to run on a 
regular schedule on the computers in the collection, as the dongle has to be 
disconnected during execution to get rid of its Mac address. When the dongle 
was disconnected and the two commands have been executed, they would drop out 
of the collection and no longer execute the commands.

While this is a usable solution, it still is a bit complex and doesn’t feel 
“smooth”. So I thought I reach out to the combined knowledge and experience of 
this group to get some additional input and hear about solutions others have 
found. As I assume, I’m not the first one who tackled this issue. And with an 
increasing amount of tablets even in enterprises, this will also become more 
common over time.


Regards
Maik Koster



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