Handige Knakker

Today i had to deploy OEM versions of Office 2003 to around 20 systems. Some needed Office 2003 Pro, some needed Office 2003 Basic. And i didn’t want to do it manually. Normally with VLK’s it’s easy. Now, every computer has it’s own unique installation key. What to do?

First get the installation files to the clients (basic or pro). Then perform an installation. Too bad you must enter a key to perform the installation. Later versions of Office don’t have this limitation.
The following command will do the trick. Just use a valid product code from one of your OEM cd’s for the product you’re installing (in this case Pro). Don’t worry; Office will not be activated yet and the license will be removed later.

start /wait c:\install\office2k3_pro\1-main\SETUP.EXE /qb PIDKEY=12345abcde12345abcde12345

Then apply SP3

start /wait C:\install\office2k3_pro\2-updates\Office2003SP3-KB923618-FullFile-NLD.exe /Q

And why not… Office 2007 Compatibility Toolkit (FileFormatConverters)

start /wait c:\install\office2k3_pro\3-2k7compat\FileFormatConverters.exe /quiet /norestart

Now that everything is installed i’m going to remove the license we’ve used to perform the installation. Note that the GUID may be different based on what product you’re installing.

reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Registration\{91110413-6000-11D3-8CFE-0150048383C9} /v ProductID /f
reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Registration\{91110413-6000-11D3-8CFE-0150048383C9} /v DigitalProductID /f

So.. this is the complete script:

@echo off
@echo Install Office 2003 Pro with temp license
start /wait c:\install\office2k3_pro\1-main\SETUP.EXE /qb PIDKEY=12345abcde12345abcde12345

@echo Install Office 2003 SP3
start /wait C:\install\office2k3_pro\2-updates\Office2003SP3-KB923618-FullFile-NLD.exe /Q

@echo Install Office 2007 File Format Converters
start /wait c:\install\office2k3_pro\3-2k7compat\FileFormatConverters.exe /quiet /norestart
@echo Install Office 2007 File Format Converters SP1
rem checking this out later, has some "i agree" button i can't get around
@echo Install Office 2007 File Format Converters SP2
rem checking this out later, has some "i agree" button i can't get around

@echo Remove Office temp license
reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Registration\{91110413-6000-11D3-8CFE-0150048383C9} /v ProductID /f
reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Registration\{91110413-6000-11D3-8CFE-0150048383C9} /v DigitalProductID /f

exit

When a user logs in and the first Office application opens, it’ll ask to enter the license key and Office will be registered.

Doing a full backup of an Exchange 2003 database was easy.
Start, run, ntbackup, backup, custom, select the exchange object, select a destination file, create a schedule and there you go: your daily scheduled database dump. This (and this is important as we’re dealing with a database) would also commit all data tot the database and purge the transaction logs.
This would then be backupped by any backup application.
More expensive backup solutions would do these kind of database tricks by default. But as i prefer to use non-intelligent, image-based backups (like V2i, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery, or Drivesnapshot), this had to be done manually.

Doing the same with Exchange 2007 took me some time to find out. Here’s how.

You’ll need Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2007. This includes a plugin for Windows Backup (wbadmin.exe, the successor of ntbackup) so that it’s Exchange-aware.
Please note that Windows Backup can only create backup on a volume basis (complete drive letters or mountpoints only)! That’s why my Exchange 2007 servers have a dedicated drive for the Exchange Database + System files + Transaction Logs. This keeps the backups as small as possible, without extra data. Allthough it’s better to have the Transaction Logs on another drive aswell in case of serious recovery, but i’m going to test that later.
Backups are on a seperate partition too.

This gives the following scenario:
C: = Windows 2008 + Exchange 2007 installation
D: = dvdrom drive
E: = dedicated to: Exchange Database, System files and Transaction Logs
F: = dedicated to: Exchange backup/dump

To create the backup, the following command is used:

WBADMIN START BACKUP -backupTarget:F: -include:E: -vssfull -quiet

-vssfull is the option that purges the Transaction Logs
-quiet will not ask “are you sure?” but still shows some output (you might want to pipe this to a file as some sort of log)
This can be scheduled with Windows Task Scheduler (Server manager, Configuration, Task Scheduler, Task Scheduler Library).

Only one instance of the backup is kept on F:, but that’s no problem as all partitions are backed up by the regular backup.

Sometimes you need to access Active Directory Repair mode through RDP.
Add this to your boot.ini and reboot:

/SAFEBOOT:DSREPAIR

Make sure you have the restore password though!
After making your desired changes to the system, remove it from boot.ini and reboot again.