Posts made by bbigford

For Windows Deployment Services, I had downloaded all the drivers needed and dumped them in the driver repository (in their own group). Fired up a laptop applicable to those drivers and installed. All drivers installed but 3. So I go into the drivers folder where the actual drivers are and inspect one of the 3. No inf file anywhere... Okay, I'll unzip the actual exe file since it's just a wrapper for the inf. No inf in the exe file. Fine, I'll download the cab file from Dell and do it that way. Those 3 drivers installed, but now there are 2 other drivers not installing, one unknown which I know to be the Free Fall Sensor driver. What the heck? Where is the inf file??? Here's a link to the driver if you want to unzip it and see for yourself. http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=F91KT&fileId=2731102933&osCode=W764&productCode=precision-m6600&languageCode=EN&categoryId=AP

It's Exchange 2013, I forgot to mention that. I deleted the local profile, re-created the domain profile (created last year but never has used it).

This is stumping me. An AD user is getting prompted for a password in Outlook every single time. We have on-premise Exchange, I've changed his password, blown away the Outlook profile, and removed/recreated the credentials manager. He has Windows 10, I have Windows 7, both are on the domain. This happens on both computers which points to it being a domain account issue. Any thoughts?

@scottalanmiller said:

Because no driver existed except the tainted one. You could turn off networking of course. but the included hardware had no means of working without the shim on the supported OS versions (all current Windows at the time.)

Ok yeah that is pretty unforgivable. Just that one by itself aside from the others. That is an intentional man in the middle. I knew Superfish was a fairly big exploit, but I didn't realize it was THAT ugly under the surface when it came to Lenovo.

@scottalanmiller said:
so you could go to Windows 10 Preview to get the Yoga 2 Pro to work without superfish.

As much as you dislike Lenovo, I half expected you just to sell the laptop after winning it.

@Dashrender said:

@BBigford said:

but I didn't realize a clean install couldn't get rid of the Superfish exploit.

The Superfish exploit was built into the WiFi driver.

Apparently, I need to stop speed reading white papers. That is pretty crazy.

@scottalanmiller said:
This was done through elaborate means that gave normal shops no means of bypassing - clean installs could not get around it.

How could a clean install not wipe that out? The software just provided a means of a man in the middle attack, a clean install takes that software out...

@scottalanmiller said:

@BBigford said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Got caught attempting to steal from the drawer four times and showed zero remorse

I must be completely missing something here... For how much they've been smeared in the news over the last year, can you elaborate on that one? Or was that the one on Josh Duggar?

They did the network shim hijack. The one associated with Superfish. That was one epic. That alone is unforgiveable and that they had a single customer since that time is, to me, inexcusable on the part of any IT department or business with knowledge of it. That was so deliberate, evil and remorseless that they should have been completely shunned. They were not and they took advantage of it. This was done through elaborate means that gave normal shops no means of bypassing - clean installs could not get around it.

They pulled an SSL cert manoeuvre, I believe, but I don't remember the details.

They did a BIOS level bloatware (which is malware when you don't want it, so malware) installation that could not be bypassed via reinstallation. You do a clean install and software that you never authorized was pushed onto your machine without permission or authorization. They got caught just doing it with bloatware, but what they intended to use it for before getting caught we will never know. that the system was compromised at the hardware level (below root level) is what it was, however.

Then they did the shared, 12345678 password backdoor issue this week.

That's four. I think I missed one or two. They've had so many issues it is pretty much impossible to track.

That's on top of running the scam that we got stuck with at Spiceworld 2014. They ran a promotion to win a laptop. My wife won and they wouldn't even respond to us until we threatened legal action. We went through them directly, they blew us off. We went through SW, both they and SW blew us off. We went public, they got their promotional people to pretend it didn't matter. We starting talking lawyer and grand theft and... a week later our superfish enabled, networking broken, no wifi crippled Yoga 2 arrived.

(For reference, at the event they lied to my wife and told her that they had no Yoga 2s there and she would get it by mail. She was the first winner. All of the MALE winners after her were handed a Yoga 2 on the spot, the very one Dominica had already won and they refused to give her. Technically, they gave hers away. Our guess is that they were guessing that she was female and unlikely to make a fuss and that they could blow her off and since they have no community presence had no idea who she was and that she would get a lot of attention when they didn't honour their commitment. But that is just speculation as to why they did it.)

That laptop giveaway is messed up. Sorry you had to go through that. There was one more thing I wanted to add about shortcomings. With the first of the Lenovo Twist models, there was a caching SSD. Take that out, and you are completely locked out of the BIOS. You could substitute it for a bootable M.2 SATA SSD, but you lose the BIOS. BIOS malware is unforgivable, but I didn't realize a clean install couldn't get rid of the Superfish exploit.

@scottalanmiller said:

The volume in a repair shop should never indicate issues, it only indicates popularity.

Valid. I've only ever bought IBM/Lenovo and Asus. Had 100% good luck with all of them.

@scottalanmiller said:

Got caught attempting to steal from the drawer four times and showed zero remorse

I must be completely missing something here... For how much they've been smeared in the news over the last year, can you elaborate on that one? Or was that the one on Josh Duggar?

@scottalanmiller said:

I use a 2012 HP Folio 13 and love it SO much more then the much newer, and more expensive, Yoga 2 Pro.

I've had my eye on the new Dell XPS 13 (as well as the Folio over the years). Agreed the Yoga is fairly expensive and the keyboard flex is less than desirable. Having worked in a lot of Dell/HP environments, the level of problems is... palpable. Finding it hard to trust Dell again. I know every manufacturer has their flaws though. Why does Dell/HP make up for 80% of the junked computers in many repair shop collections? Well it could be due to market saturation for one I guess. More people have Dell and HP so more will be brought in to shops to recycle. I don't know. I swore I'd never buy another Dell, but we use the Latitudes and Precisions at work over the years and they've been fairly solid with some totally unexplainable issues that I relate to the mobos.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

Leo still considers Lenovo a good brand

I'd literally fire someone who was recommending Lenovo today.

Lol got very strong feelings on that one. All manufacturers seem to do an equally terrible job on the hardware side since they are just consumer computers. Superfish and software aside, what are you recommending these days to people as a "good go-to brand"?

@scottalanmiller said:

I haven't used VMware Workstation since the early 2000s.

Well at almost $300 I can see why.

@scottalanmiller said:

Does VMware Workstation offer consoler over network with something like VNC or RDP?

I'm fairly certain they both support VNC/RDP now. From what I've been reading as well on dates, they've both been supporting it for a little while.

@Breffni-Potter said:

Apart from that, Virtual Box does more and is completely free.

Can you define "more"? I've found them both to be nearly identical in feature sets more recently, unless you're in a vSphere environment in which case it is easier to build in Workstation and upload to vCenter. But I am now in a Hyper-V environment so that point is irrelevant.

@scottalanmiller Aside from the cost, and the uncertain development of VMware Workstation... do you see any benefits of VMware Workstation over VirtualBox? With more recent advances in VirtualBox, I'm struggling to find more advanced features in VMware Workstation on any level.

I've been reading more and more about VMware Workstation and Fusion devs getting the axe. Scott Alan Miller made a point in one post, that said people are more stringent about choosing a hypervisor, than they are about choosing something like a desktop. I do agree with that as I've bounced back and forth between VirtualBox and Workstation. Some love VirtualBox because of the price, others like Workstation because of their own reasons. I know some differences in the past had to do with cloning/snapshots/network adapters. But I've saw everything pretty much blend together now. What is your preference, and why?

@BBigford Overall this is just poor planning. I shouldn't have built them on the actual machines. I should have built virtual images so I could:

*Obtain snapshots before sysprep and
*Get around sysprep rearm because snapshots date back prior to first sysprep.

If I can convert them, I don't have to rebuild them.

Because of our scale, I decided to stop using SCCM (only 110 users) and use WDS. Works fantastic. The only problem is updating the images. There are now 150 updates to new images that run after a reimage plus a couple programs that need to be added. I found some support to a convert-windowsimage.ps1 -showui PowerShell script that one can run. I got an execution policy error and had to change that to run the script. Once I changed that, it ran but didn't load up the WIM2VHD GUI. No errors, nothing.

We don't have VMware Workstation so I'm trying to do this in VirtualBox. In short, how do you load up a .wim in a virtual instance (doesn't HAVE to be VirtualBox) so that I can modify it, then capture it as a .wim to be uploaded to WDS? Surely I can't be the only one who wants to do this. It would make things so much easier than trying to track down the machines (we don't have extras) and modify/capture.