Visual Studio – When Administrator privileges are needed?

A lot of times users will ask to have administrator privileges on their machine because they “use Visual Studio”. This is a very broad concept and not every Visual Studio user needs administrator privileges.

Microsoft created a table which explains the right user permissions needed for each task:
Microsoft Docs - User permissions and Visual Studio

GPOs - Disabling BitLocker Service Fails via Group Policy Preferences [Solved]

Today I've came across a strange issue when trying to disable "BitLocker Drive Encryption Service" with Group Policy Preferences (GPP).

Thanks to Helge Klein - Tools for IT Pros website this was really quick to solve!

After some reading, it seems it's related with the service permissions. This can be proven if you navigate to event viewer and you'll see a warning in application event log with an "Access Denied" for the Group Policy Services source.

"Googling" a little more about this, I've found out a way to solve this one.

So, follow theses steps:

1. First of all, download SetAcl from here
2. Now run following from the command-line (elevated)
   SetACL -on BDESVC -ot srv -actn ace -ace n:Administrators;p:full

And...it's all done! Now just execute "gpupdate /force" or reboot and then BitLocker Drive Encryption Service will be in "Disabled" state.

MDT 2013 Update 1 Version 8298 - Invalid Credentials

Microsoft has recently launched a new version of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 Update 1 version 8298.

There's been a couple of issues with this build because the way the DeploymentShare$ it's created.

If you take a look at this share permission, you'll notice that permissions are just for "CREATOR OWNER" instead of "Everyone" like the previous versions.

Besides that, now the DeployRoot parameter it's not configured on the bootstrap.ini.

So, to make this work again, follow this steps:

1. First, you'll need to edit your DeploymentShare$ permissions so that you can connect to MDT from the machine you're deployment.
   You can achieve this simply by adding the group "Everyone" to the share permissions, or if you want to be more restrictive you can add the "Administrators" group with "Full Control".
   
   
   
   
2. Now that you're done with the permissions, you'll need to take care of bootstrap.ini.
   To do so, just navigate to your DeploymentShare folder, and open "bootstrap.ini" that's located on the "Control" folder
   
   
3. Here you'll have to had under "[Default]" the following parameter:
   DeployRoot=\\your_mdt_server\DeploymentShare$
   
   
4. Save the file and you're done.

Now that's you've change the bootstrap.ini, like always, you'll need to regenerate your boot files:

1. Open MDT Workbench and click properties on your deployment share and then Update
   
   
2. Here you'll need to choose "Completely regenerate the boot images" and now just wait for the process to finish.
   
   

And you're done!

Hope this helps some people that are having some issues after installing this latest version of MDT.