Nick Moseley's Day-to-Day Technical Journey
You can see the following post on my upgrade path to SP2 on SCCM 2007. Below that is a short list of my post upgrade tasks, which will be done in the months following, but not the night of the upgrade…
http://t3chn1ck.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/my-sccm-2007-sp2-upgrade-path/
Post Upgrade Tasks
The upgrade path for my SCCM 2007 R2 to SP2 is as below. I thought it may be helpful to someone out there…
See the following post on my post upgrade tasks, which will occur in the months following the upgrade
http://t3chn1ck.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/post-sccm-2007-sp2-upgrade-tasks/
I’m working on upgrading our sites to the recently released SP2 for SCCM 2007 so as to support Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. In using the prerequisite checker, I was a given an upgrade warning that “All distribution points in the site to be upgraded should have the latest version of software distribution packages before beginning the upgrade process”. In looking more closesly at the warning (within log file C:\ConfigMgrPrereq.log) there was information on the query being executed to determine if any packages have potentially mismatching versions.
Using my Google-fu, I found a post from the ConfigMgr Support Team Blog which led me to a query to determine the impacted packages that I was able to run within SQL Server Management Studio (query below). Unfortunately, almost all of our packages are impacted, so I am just going to disregard the warning for now….
select Name, PkgID, SourceVersion, StoredPkgVersion
from SMSPackages
where StoredPkgVersion <> SourceVersion
Sometimes when troubleshooting SCCM client software inventory, it is useful to retain the XML file which contains details on what the scan discovered. To do this, simply create a file named “archive_reports.sms” within C:\WINDOWS\system32\CCM\Inventory\temp\. If the scan is just reporting a delta, the file will be small. But if it is a full SINV scan, then it could be large (the biggest I’ve seen is around 75 MB)
There are times when you may be unable to use “Right-click tools” to initiate a full software inventory scan on an SCCM client. To schedule this to occur automatically upon the next normally schedule SINV cycle, do the following:
The Deployment Guys created of a handy utility (v2) that will automatically format your Task Sequences so that they are readable. It uses a stylesheet to format the .xml with nifty columns and colors. Check it out…No more looking through confusing XML code!
This is a little SQL web report I created that identifies systems which have not reported hardware or software inventories within the last 14 days.
SELECT DISTINCT
SYS.Netbios_Name0,
HWSCAN.LastHWScan,
SWSCAN.LastScanDate
FROM v_R_System SYS
…
Full LessThan14Days SQL Code Here
Note: you’ll want to change the collection ID to be the one you need. Or modify the code to prompt for a collection would probably be even better still!
I have been struggling with a problem all day that, when I was inches from giving up, I found the cause and the workaround. Thought I’d share it too.
Sometimes it is necessary to not force a mandatory start time for an SMS/SCCM advertisement, but intead to allow the end-user to manually trigger the advertisement/program from the control panel applet “Run Advertised Programs”. The situation was that, for all servers within the targeted collection (only 4 servers total), the Run Advertised Programs applet was blank. And there was no “New Program Available” system tray icon. I tried everything from different Program settings, different Advertisement settings, reviewed the Advertised Programs Client Agent, collection settings, etc etc etc.
After taking a short break to play company softball, I came back to the office to practiced my Google-foo skills. I stumbled upon a forum posting about RDP interfering with the applet. With my fingers crossed, I launched RDP in admin mode (e.g. mstsc /admin), logged into the server, launched the Run Advertised Program applet, and voila …there was my advertisement.
Hopefully one day I’ll find the solution and update this post…or maybe someone will read it who already knows the solution!
This VBScript is for disabling the Fingerprint device in BIOS. It has only been tested on a few newer HP models.
‘============================================================
‘ AUTHOR: Nick Moseley , http://t3chn1ck.wordpress.com
‘ DATE : 5/29/2009
‘ COMMENT: This script is for disabling the Fingerprint Device in BIOS
‘ It has been tested on HP models – 6515b, 6535b, 2510p – but may
‘ function for other models
‘============================================================
Option Explicit
When troubleshooting WMI on SMS/SCCM clients, I’ve frequently used the following command to attempt a repair of the WMI repository. I don’t recall where I found it (several years ago), but I also don’t want to ever forget it!
