Category Archives: IT

Install Microsoft Office 365 on Server 2016

This was adapted very, very, slightly from this original blog post by Daniel Z. Stinson, thank you!

  1. Download Office Deployment Tool: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=49117
    Extract to a simple path such as c:\Files\Office_Deploy
  2. Create share on the folder you created above. I shared the folder named “Office_Deploy” and set “Full Permissions” to “Everyone”
  3. Edit the configuration-Office365-x86.xml file to be the following below. Edit line 2 to be the path to your share that you created in the previous step:

    <Configuration>
    <Add SourcePath="\\YOURSERVER\Office_Deploy\" OfficeClientEdition="32" >
    <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail">
    <Language ID="en-us" />
    </Product>
    </Add>
    <!-- <Updates Enabled="TRUE" UpdatePath="\\Server\Share\" /> -->
    <Display Level="None" AcceptEULA="TRUE" />
    <Property Name="SharedComputerLicensing" Value="1" />
    <!-- <Logging Path="%temp%" /> -->
    <!-- <Property Name="AUTOACTIVATE" Value="1" /> -->
    </Configuration>

  4. Run the following from an elevated command prompt:

    C:\Files\Office_Deploy>.\setup.exe /download configuration-Office365-x86.xml
    This downloads the installer files/package.

  5. Wait for files to download, there is no visual confirmation, but I did see an “Office” folder get created.
  6. Run the following from an elevated command prompt:
    C:\Files\Office_Deploy>.\setup.exe /configure configuration-Office365-x86.xml

Enjoy!

Secure Erase SSD

I ran into my first need to secure erase an SSD. On a traditional spinning disk hard drive, I used the ‘shred’ command in Linux and would write zeros to the drive and it would take a long time with multiple passes (paranoid?).

With SSDs writing zeros is strongly discouraged for the sake of the SSD lifespan. The steps below I used on two Dell 6400 series laptops and were adapted from the AskUbuntu forum.

Note: I could not find any instructions on how to do this with a SSD drive attached via a USB SATA dock. I had to plug the SSD directly to the motherboard via a SATA cable.

  1. Boot Ubuntu from a Live USB Flash Drive
  2. Open a Terminal
  3. Find your drive with: fdisk -l in this example, my drive was on /dev/sda
  4. Check your drive to see if it is frozen: hdparm -I /dev/sda
  5. If Frozen suspend the device with: systemctl suspend
  6. Wait a few seconds and then power the system back on.
  7. Check the frozen status again with: hdparm -I /dev/sda
  8. Once drive is ‘not frozen’ I found I had to set up a password, in this case, I just set the password to 12345678:
    hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass 12345678 /dev/sda (replace 12345678 with the chosen password)
  9. This should return some confirmation text including: security_password: "12345678"
  10. Check that security has been enabled: hdparm -I /dev/sda (look for the enabled or not enabled line)
  11. Issue the Secure Erase command: hdparm --user-master u --security-erase 12345678 /dev/sda
  12. Do a quick: fdisk -l /dev/sda to make sure no partitions are there.