Integrating Windows XPe into Active Directory
Posted on Friday, 7th March, 2008 in Life
As the guys over at FreeWyseMonkeys demonstrated with JoinDomain.zip, it ain’t hard to integrate a Windows XP Embedded system into Active Directory.
You basically need this:
- A system powered by Windows XP Embedded
- netdom.exe (from any Windows XP - SP2 in your MUI language)
- some know-how, on how to use netdom to integrate it into your AD
Everything else is already present on the Windows XP Embedded systems I’ve seen. Then let’s get it on !
First, copy over the netdom.exe to your XPe, and then run the following command:
netdom.exe join /d:barfoo.org \ /OU:"OU=Thinclients,OU=Computer,DC=barfoo,DC=org" \ %COMPUTERNAME% \ /ud:Administrator /pd:P@ssw0rd \ /uo:Administrator /po:P@ssw0rd \ /verbose
Here as a note:
- ud and pd is a User/Password inside your Active Directory with the permissions to create new computer accounts
- uo and po is a User/Password with administrative rights on the Windows XP Embedded device
After that, you just need to reboot, Et Voilà! the system is present in your Active Directory. Just be aware, if you’re using a localized Windows XP Embedded by Wyse, make sure to contact your fellow Wyse Support, as the is a bug with the MUI stuff needed for the domain logon.
Also, as yet-another side note: The default Administator password is mentioned in this Knowledge Base entry.
Getting the 2X service up and running
Posted on Thursday, 21st February, 2008 in Life
As I mentioned before, we decided against the Citrix Presentation Server solution in favour of the 2X LoadBalancer and ApplicationServer combination. You’re gonna say, but Citrix does the same and it’s only one “application frame“. 2X is exactly the same.
Customizing Thin Clients
Posted on Saturday, 13th October, 2007 in Life
As some of you know, the company I’m currently working for, recently acquired some thin clients to replace our old computers for the students to work on. Those PC’s are like P3 800 MHz with 512MB RAM and sadly don’t run Office 2007 anymore, so we replaced them with thin clients and are streaming those applications from a Windows Terminal Server cluster (created by and with 2X Application LoadBalancer).
So far so good, getting them to display the applications ain’t hard, the real hard part starts when you want additional things from this Windows XPe (Embedded), like lets say getting them to display a German language.
First thing is, the management software for those terminals (Wyse Device Manager or WDM) uses it’s own scripting language (with pseudo abbreviations like DF or MR - Delete File and Merge Registry - get it ?), which control the whole distribution of “packages“.
That ain’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just an additional “language” you need to understand/learn. The initial threshold is rather low (it ain’t no C++ or C#) as it’s just a pseudo language, you just need to make sure you do things in a certain order (like use the auto login registry entry with a new administrator password *after* you changed the administrator password).
We had a lot of work at the beginning of the week (like getting all packages working), and I think we managed finishing all of them (besides some default icon foo, for which is plenty of time when them terminals are already in use).