Automating WSUS 3.0 server with Powershell on Win 2k8r2

It was supposed to be easy... EASY!!!!

...this ended up being the first line that actually did anything relevant... obviously not fucking easy.

[reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.UpdateServices.Administration")

So this project started as usual, with a false hopes and unkept promises

PS C:\chef> Add-WindowsFeature OOB-WSUS

WARNING: Installation of 'Windows Server Update Services' is not supported on the command line. Skipping...

Oh Come on!!!!

So Step 1 - Install Pre - Reqs

"web-server", "Web-Asp-Net", "Web-Windows-Auth", "Web-Metabase", "File-Services" | foreach {if (!(Get-WindowsFeature $_)){add-windowsfeature $_}}

Step 2 - download / contribute to my Chef cookbook which will do it all for you

https://github.com/vinyar/wsus

The thing you probably really care about the most is here:

https://github.com/vinyar/wsus/blob/master/recipes/configure_wsus.rb 

Chef and Ruby and Gems and Windows

One of the many things in Chef ecosystem is Gems. Think of Gems as DLLs. They have versions, dependencies, and while MSFT figured this dependency hell years ago, Gems do not have that luxury.

One of the minuses is that when you install a gem, it pulls down depends, when you uninstall a gem, depends stay behind.

A - clean up unused gems

gem cleanup

B - nuke everything and start for scratch.

gem list | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs gem uninstall -aIx

C - read about bundler and track your depends in a gemfile. Each cookbook has its own gemfile. You always update your gemfile and never install gems manually

D - when your gems start complaining about missing dependencies see B

A good read:
http://shanky.org/2010/09/02/painlessly-remove-all-ruby-gems-on-windows/

Chef - Packer and generating images from custom ISO

If you want to develop quicker, you cant sit around waiting for your operations team to give you a server. .. and then give you another server when you destroyed it 20 minutes later. That's where you download VirtualBox, get Packer, Vagrant and go nuts.

The point of this post is to talk about packer templates you can get from GitHub. (templates have been moved into another project, but you can still get all of them for basic packer consumption from a dev branch of the same repo. Or just roll back master branch a couple of commits):

https://github.com/misheska/basebox-packer

If you want to use a ISO other than the one in a template, you'll need to specify a couple of parameters for packer, and get the SHA1 of the ISO you're using.

If you have OpenSSL, SHA1 is super easy: 

openssl sha1 c:\Images\raw\7601.17514.101119-1850_x64fre_server_eva
l_en-us-GRMSXEVAL_EN_DVD.iso

Alternatively, you can get this tool from the mothership:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11533

Command:

packer build -only=virtualbox-iso -var 'iso_url=C:\Images\raw\7601.17514.101119-1850_x64fre_server_eval_en-us-GRMSXEVAL_EN_DVD.iso' -var 'iso_checksum=beed231a34e90e1dd9a04b3afabec31d62ce3889' win2008r2-enterprise.json

That's it. 5 minutes later you will have a brand spanking new virtual box for continuous destruction.

 ______________________________________ 
/ The best way to learn Chef is to use \
\ Chef. --Me                           /
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 _________________________________________ 
/ Actually, my goal is to have a sandwich \
\ named after me.                         /
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       `.  ,.'        
        |___|        
        :o o:   O   
       _`~^~'_  |    
     /'   ^   `=)
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   `(<=|     |= /'
       |     |
       |_____|
 ~~~~~~ ===== ~~~~~~~~