WMUG

Patching servers or ‘managing Windows assets’ in a DMZ has always been a challenge. Trying to manage assets with one systems management solution in two domains, the DMZ (external network) and the intranet (Internal network) broadens the challenge further. All designs put forward to manage assets in a DMZ using the internal networks systems management solution, essentially depend on spinning services, or in ConfigMgr...

I’ve created a repository on GitHub for PatchMaster here . https://github.com/RobUK101/PatchMaster The entire Visual Studio 2015 authored C# code base seems to be published AOK: I reserve no rights on this code, feel free to use however you see fit. Obviously a release of an out and out clone with no enhancements will be frowned upon. I’ll continue to maintain this code branch,which is actually the source...

Technical Preview 1810.2 introduced the first cut for converting MSI’s to the new application installation technology MSIX , direct from the ConfigMgr console, and in this post I’m going to kick the features tyre’s and try to get an end to end test out of the way. Head over to the TP documentation here . We have some funky technologies to install: MSIX Packaging Tool from the Microsoft Store Latest Windows...

Sub-titled “ConfigMgr High Availability feature and making the Content Library highly available”. In this article I’m going to focus specifically on considerations on placement of the Content Library for High Availability purposes. The Content Library , an under-the-radar-for-most ‘layer’ residing on the Primary in ConfigMgr, now has to be moved away from a Primary before High Availability can be enabled. It cannot...

I’ve been very much interested in the High Availability feature since it inception. I’ve followed its evolution in technical preview, kicking its tyres, discussing it with the product group and MVP peers, and seeing the feature come out of the development dock, technical preview, to sail around the sea in the form of current branch, is exciting. Exciting because the High Availability feature is a high-value design...

Current Branch Build 1806 released on the 17th, Check out the Build 1806 What’s New page for more info: Intune Hybrid is no longer a supported scenario CMPivot is welcomed into the production build, what a smart bit of tech Changes to High Availability , the support of a fully functional additional Primary, we’re closer closer to the day when we can migrate by standing up another Primary and closing down...

One of the things I’ve noticed over a couple of decades as a contractor who eventually turned into a roaming consultant, is that my customers, their engineers, ranging from complete novices to experts, a troubling percentage have no idea the documentation library exists, or they know it exists, but it is out of sight and thus out of mind (most fall into this grouping), for a few it’d be easier to visit Mars than that...

Slow in blogging, tweet is my primary source for announcements. So PatchMaster 1.5 landed, and in time for Patch Tuesday for some of you! The updates to the tool, I hope they help, let me know on twitter @robmvp or comments on this blog if you have any feature requests or issues. Download from the TechNet Gallery here and let me know how you get on with it. I wrote it for you For us

I’m at the tail-end of the development of PatchMaster to bring it up to version 1.5. The driver for this code release was silent running mode, headless mode. And instead of releasing once done, I kept the project back longer than I normally do, several weeks in fact, so that I can return to the code here and there to tweak, finesse and add in more features. It has worked out quite well, things I would have tutted...

July 1st 2018 brought some exciting news, I am the grateful recipient of a renewal in the MVP programme for Enterprise Mobility, SCCM and Intune. This marks my 10th year, a whole decade of being involved in something truly wonderful and extremely appealing to the likes of me. I would like to thank the global community first, you’re the reason I do this, I get endorphin hits helping you all where I can. When I see...

Customer asked me to hobble together a solution, that would allow them to VNC into a WINPE session as soon as WINPE has finished starting up, and before the ConfigMgr pre-execution hook kicked in. Someone still needs to boot WINPE and look for the IP, but once the IP lease is issued, it’ll be reused by the VM if WINPE is rebooted, making a reconnection reasonably reliable. If you try this approach using ConfigMgr’s...

I’m extremely pleased and happy to be able to announce that today (1st June 2018) I received an email to tell me that I have been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award in Enterprise Mobility for 2018-2019. To say I am pleased is an understatement and naturally I have a list of thank yous for people who have helped me to achieve this. First and foremost my family – My wonderful (and patient) wife Anna...

We have a new tracing tool in town, OneTrace, which comes in the latest Technical Preview Build 1804 . You’ll also find the Log Viewer that comes with Support Center: Above its opened several logs and merged them together as default behaviour. For CMTrace users, highlighting is located in Advanced Filters > Add > Highlight, a few extra clicks than before, but doable, especially what with the flexibility of...

One of my customers is currently waiting for the results to come back, from a deployment of a Configuration Baseline which was pushed out to detect the Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser DLL problem. The problem itself can cause chaos on the networks, due to excessive WSUS communications, and should be read up on here. The problem seems to be due to specific versions of the Compatibility Appraiser, which version...

I did a demonstration of Windows AutoPilot at the Global Azure Bootcamp in Birmingham last Saturday 21st April, my demo failed so I had to flip to a pre-recorded demonstration. I also mentioned that I’d been having some issues the previous week when preparing for the demo and if I found out the cause I would share it. Well, here it is. I found out today that there have been some changes to AutoPilot requirements and...

Managed to get a new version of PatchMaster ready for shipping, as version 1.4. You can download it here on TechNet Gallery . This one has several enhancements, that should make it more universally adoptable. I realise that it will be nigh-on-difficult, to make PatchMaster an all-singing-all-dancing highly configurable tool that’ll meet everyone’s requirements; But I can get PatchMaster to meet most requirements...

Finally have the time to sit down and work out a guide to explain what PatchMaster is, and why you want it to do what it does. PatchMaster automates the entire SUM experience. With a one time configuration, each Patch Cycle can be initiated with full automation end-to-end, from searching for patches, to downloading and deploying them. If you are use to rolling your own each month, burning time on the task, this...

Currently working for a customer who is transitioning their Patch workload from WSUS Standalone to ConfigMgr, and I’ve introduced PatchMaster to automate the middle part, the actual monthly work, leaving them to keep an eye on Reporting, and reacting to Out of Cycle patches if needs be. They asked me for a unique scenario: Security and Critical Updates must induce a controlled reboot (count down, UI experience...

In this series: Intune Standalone–Part 1 In Part 1 of this series, I enrolled a device that in an post-OOBE state, had it in workgroup mode and finished the setup. Here’s a brief run through on what it looks like to manually enrol a device that is sitting at the first prompt of Windows OOBE [ 2 ]. I’m enrolling a Windows 10 Build 1709 Operating System, with unmodified media. We will at some point in the series...

A new build release has arrived for System Center Configuration Manager Current Branch, Build 1802. Just look at the crazy treasure in this release, some of which was coded from ideas and work done at the SCCM MVP Hackathon, that took place in Seattle last November and which I attended. Was a amazing experience working so closely with the product group, to realise some of the stuff that landed in this release, there...

Welcome to my guides on using Intune Standalone and ConfigMgr, to service Windows 10 devices. They will be aimed towards initiates, basically anyone that hasn’t yet dug their spurs into Intune and Azure. Intune and Azure are an ever shifting landscape, so if you are visiting, the guide was written in March 2018 and some options or call outs may have been renamed or deprecated. The scope of these guides will be limited...

As the author I can see that PatchMaster wasn’t ‘there’ yet, worked, but needed much more coding loving before it could become a universally usable tool. Version 1.1 worked well enough, but much of the Deployment Properties were defaulted and unavailable. Version 1.2 nails this down with full deployment property control. And I took it a bit further, which took a few days of keyboard hammering, but now you can define...

I previously wrote a short post and did a demonstration video of the Run Scripts feature in Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager - https://morethanpatches.com/2018/02/12/sccm-run-scripts-pre-release-feature/ In that demo I used an example script created by Jörgen Nilsson which ran on the client, zipped up the SCCM log files folder and copied to back to a central file share. After some further testing with...

Released V1.1 last night, while I was ‘adjusting’ back to UK time from Seattle time, I fixed up the problem causing V1.0 to become a Tech Demo with no fangs. I let it run overnight, and all my minions are lined up for Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10: We even have special Software Update Groups that you will use for product reporting per month, a rollup of a patches classifications per product: Staggered deployments...

So each month I try to cover what’s new in the tech preview version of Configuration Manager. This month however, was a little different. Microsoft dropped the proverbial bomb of Tech Preview 1802 in mid-Feb and it was a big one, no fewer than 21 new features to cover off and a combination of life and work kind of got in the way this month for me. I hit the upgrade button on the day and this is probably the first time...