Have you ever wanted to configure the Dell BIOS remotely? Sometimes, it would be pretty awesome to just push out a group of BIOS settings and enjoy another cup of coffee! Do I have your attention now? Good! To start off with, you will want to read Part 1 first. You will also need to have the Dell BIOS Update Utility, also known as CCTK installed. If needed, here is the tools link. Finally, you will want to decide the settings that you will want to deploy. As a basic guide, you will probably want to push out these settings:
- A BIOS password
- A configured boot order that removes unneeded devices
- Automatic power on and the power on time
- Remote wake up on LAN
If you will be deploying these settings to laptops, you will probably want to configure two additional settings:
- Disabling the Wireless switch (prevents users from accidently turning off the wireless card)
- Enabling TPM (allows you to use BitLocker)
While it is certainly true that you can use WMI to query the BIOS for certain settings, you won’t be able to write any information. Stick with the Dell’s Client Configuration Toolkit to configure your BIOS settings and you won’t have to deal with the screenshot below.
Today, we will create a GUI BIOS setting package that allows us to configure any and every BIOS setting on a machine. We can even create generic packages that apply across models. In our environment, we manage just a single BIOS package for 16 different models.