Powershell User Group Sweden – October 2013 Meeting!

As promised during my session at the Powershell User Group Sweden meet last week I will publish my scripts used in my SMA session. And here they are!

For those of you not attending the meet I had the opportunity to give a super compact lesson in Powershell Workflow to cover the basics. Workflows are after all the foundation of SMA. I gave the attendees an overview of SMA administration. Both in powershell/ISE and the Windows Azure Pack portal!

64-bit script execution in SCCM

Pushing out scripts with SCCM can, depending on your environment, be a bit of a hassle. Even if the script runs perfectly from the cmd/powershell console on all the target computer it’s not a guarantee it will run smoothly when distributing the script through SCCM.

Problem

We’re trying to install Type 1 Format fonts with the following non-signed powershell script named “Install.ps1”:

$sa = New-Object -ComObject Shell.Application
$pathFonts = "$(Get-Location)\Fonts"
$pathDest = "$env:windir\Fonts"
$folder = $sa.Namespace($pathFonts)
$fonts = Get-ChildItem $pathFonts *.PFM

foreach ($font in $fonts) {
	$testpath = "$pathDest\$($font.Name)"
	if ((Test-Path $testpath) -eq $false) {
		Write-Output "Installing font: $($font.Name)"
		$folder.ParseName($($font.Name)).InvokeVerb("Install")
	}
}

In short the script will scan a folder for .PFM files and do a Right-Click -> Install action on the object. This script is called from a Package/Program with the following command line:

powershell.exe -executionpolicy bypass -file .\Install.ps1

When testing this script we notice that it’s installing the fonts on Windows 7 x86 but it’s not working properly on Windows 7 x64. When looking deeper into what the script is doing on Windows 7 x64 we notice the following:

• Script output tells that the fonts install successfully
• We’re unable to locate fonts under C:\Windows\Fonts
• Font files are located under C:\Windows\Fonts when using dir
• Registry values are located under the Wow6432Node

Solution

The SCCM programs are per default started from a 32-bit command-line. To get around this problem we need to run the script in a 64-bit environment. What we’re essentially doing to work around this problem is starting the 64-bit executable from the 32-bit command line. Since the powershell.exe is located under the System32 folder we’ll have to use the sysnative folder.