Category: Windows

Office 365 install without activating

If you need to install Office 365 on a user’s laptop but not activate it (because you can only do it five times yourself), read on…

Get the deployment tool (link for Office 365 2016)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49117

Run the executable – this will extract the setup.exe and configuration.xml files. Put these in a handy directory.

The default configuration.xml should be ok for downloading the installation sources (32-bit Office and Visio). Run setup.exe /download – this will download the office sources to a subdirectory Office\Data (there’s about 1.25 Gb of files). Note there is no progress indicator!

To install, edit the configuration.xml file to uncomment and change the Display option as follows;

<Display Level="None" AcceptEULA="FALSE" />

Run the setup tool again to install:

setup.exe /configure

(If no other options are given it will use the configuration.xml in the same directory and the install data sources in the Office\Data subdirectory).

Note: no progress is shown, except for the setup program eventually exiting.

This should result in a default install of Office and Visio, ready to be activated on first run.

If you are doing this for a system image, do not run any of the Office programs! Even if you cancel the activation dialog and exit, it still generates a unique ID for the install that you probably don’t want to clone.

To see the various other things the tool can do see the documentation linked from the download page. (One interesting thing – you apparently can install a version that allows multiple people on a system to use Office without it counting against their 5-system limit, such as on a terminal server. In this case we’d probably use the Office 2016 install activated against the KMS server, but someone might find this useful).

Seagate DiscWizard insisting on reboots

Sometimes Seagate DiscWizard insists on rebooting, even if you’re cloning between two non-system drives. It is worth checking the state of the target drive. I found that even with no partitions, a target drive with a GPT partition table caused this issue. Solved by firing up diskpart:

list disk
select disk {number}
clean

This wipes the partition table (and consequently the disk appears in the Disk Management console as not initialized). DiscWizard should then clone to it without complaints.

Volume licenced Office 2016 Repeated Activation Prompts

Had a situation that seems to be fairly common – get laptop, uninstall “Get Office” program, install Office 2016 and activate using KMS server, which seems to work fine. Then when you fire up one of the programs you get the “Lets get started” screen. You can close this and it works ok, but it is annoying.

To fix this see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3170450 (deleting a couple of registry keys that make Office think it’s still in OEM mode).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\OEM

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\OEM

Dell OMSA install on Server 2012 R2 issues

  • Did install first as network admin – couldn’t get page to display and update patch (from 7.4.0 to 7.4.0.2) didn’t complete. Scrubbed and reinstalled as local admin – no problems.
  • firewall exception may be required for remote access.
  • https listener warning isn’t relevant for the https web interface!
  • send test email button didn’t work in ie11, does in chrome.

Installation and configuration of EAGLE 7 licencing server

File download

The links on the cadsoft page were broken when I did this. The licencing setup files were found at:

ftp://ftp.cadsoft.de/eagle/licensing/7.0.0/

The later version directories only contain the lichostid files (also included in the full install). You do need this for the hostid – it doesn’t just work off the MAC address!

Install (Windows)

Put the unzipped file tree somewhere convenient – on Shuna it’s just stuck in C:

To install the server as a service, use the command line switch:

lmadmin -installservice "EAGLE flexlm"

or whatever you want the service to be called. You have to dig deep into the pdf documentation to find that one!

Log into the web interface

http://licencehost:8090

Login with default credentials (admin:admin) and change the password

Licence file

As per documentation – Administration > Vendor Daemon Configuration > Import License. This should import the file which points to the vendor daemon in the file tree.

Client configuration

Choose multi-user licence. Server is

shuna.physics.gla.ac.uk

and we’re currently using the default port (21111)

Getting the Windows automatic update prompt to appear (inc. RDP sessions)

Often the Windows update shield in the system tray won’t appear when you RDP into systems. A fairly reliable trick seems to be the following:

  1. Stop the Automatic Update service ( ”net stop wuauserv” from the command line ).
  2. Set the ”NextFeaturedUpdatesNotificationTime” key ( located at ”HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update\” ) to a date and time slightly ahead (say a minute or two) of the present.
  3. Start the Automatic Update service ( ”net start wuauserv” ).

Or use this script (save as .vbs):

Dim newDate, newDateFormatted, newYear, newMonth, newDay, newHour, newMinute, newSecond, notificationString, strHTML
Dim objExplorer, objWshShell, objWMIService, objService

newDate = DateAdd("n", 2, Now)

newYear = Year(newDate)
newMonth = zeropad(Month(newDate), 2)
newDay = zeropad(Day(newDate), 2)
newHour = zeropad(Hour(newDate), 2)
newMinute = zeropad(Minute(newDate), 2)
newSecond = zeropad(Second(newDate), 2)

newDateFormatted = newYear & "-" & newMonth & "-" & newDay & " " & newHour & ":" & newMinute & ":" & newSecond

Private Function zeroPad(m, t)
zeroPad = String(t-Len(m),"0")&m
End Function

Set objExplorer = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")

objExplorer.Navigate "about:blank"
objExplorer.ToolBar = 0
objExplorer.StatusBar = 0
objExplorer.Width = 400
objExplorer.Height = 200
objExplorer.Visible = 1
objExplorer.Document.Title = "Kicking Updater"

Set objWshShell = CreateObject( "WScript.Shell" )
Set objWMIService = GetObject( "winmgmts://./root/cimv2" )
Set objService = objWMIService.Get("Win32_Service.Name='wuauserv'")
objService.StopService()

While objService.Started
strHTML = strHTML & "<p>Waiting for wuauserv service to stop</p>"
objExplorer.Document.Body.InnerHTML = strHTML
WScript.Sleep 1000
Set objService = objWMIService.Get("Win32_Service.Name='wuauserv'")
Wend

objWshShell.RegWrite "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update\NextFeaturedUpdatesNotificationTime", newDateFormatted, "REG_SZ"
strHTML = strHTML & "</p>NextFeaturedUpdatesNotificationTime set to " & newDateFormatted & "</p>"
objExplorer.Document.Body.InnerHTML = strHTML

objService.StartService()

While Not objService.Started
strHTML = strHTML & "<p>Waiting for wuauserv service to start</p>"
objExplorer.Document.Body.InnerHTML = strHTML
WScript.Sleep 1000
Set objService = objWMIService.Get("Win32_Service.Name='wuauserv'")
Wend

strHTML = strHTML & "<p>Finished. The Update notifier should pop up in the tray at " & FormatDateTime(newDate, 3) & "</p>"
objExplorer.Document.Body.InnerHTML = strHTML

Set objService = Nothing
Set objWMIService = Nothing
Set objWshShell = Nothing
Set objExplorer = Nothing

Wscript.Quit