WMUG

In the following series of blog posts I will introduce you to C#, Visual Studio and the ConfigMgr SDK, and show you how to produce your own custom tooling easily. The motivation behind this series of postings is to enable you to create community tools or bespoke tooling to assist you in your day-to-day ConfigMgr role, and thus to enhance the Community overall, as hopefully you’ll produce the very next best tool and we...

I’ve been having some conversations over the last few days around whether or not Hyper-V replica is a supported solution for providing some level of high availability within a Configuration Manager environment and to be honest I still don&rsquo...

I didn’t actually have a strong-use case for developing the Content Location Request Generator tool, I only wrote it as I was helping a guy along the way with his C# and ConfigMgr 2012 R2 CCM Messaging SDK learning, turns out I actually had a great use-case on the first customer I visit after coding the tool! Customer complained that updated package source does not arrive at ConfigMgr Clients … time to check things out...

I just finished writing a Console based edition of CLRGen for Windows. You provide command line arguments, an MP name, PackageID and Package Version and get a response, useful for automation via Orchestra etc to test if the Management Point is responding, the XML response could be parsed or detected. Usage Example: Let me know if you find a use for it, give me a shout on Twitter @RobMVP !

The last tool I wrote, CLRGen , is based on the ConfigMgr 2012 R2 CCM SDK DLL , and communicating with a Management Point using a HTTP Sender, which is not the same as a ConfigMgr Sender. All very fancy and new stuff, very easily approachable if you have the time, patience and a web browser :-) I thought I’d share a technique I just learnt for compiling an executable that includes an embedded resource, the CCM SDK DLL...

A customer asked me to write what seemed like a simple report to render health and IP address information for resources within a chosen limiting collection. The two tasks here are to limit by Collection, that’s pretty simple, but to also...

Recently Gabriel Alicea @ConfigMgrGeek asked me on a Twitter PM if I could help him get a handle on using the ConfigMgr 2012 Client Messaging SDK in C# that is available in the ConfigMgr 2012 R2 SDK , and use it to generate a Content Location Request....

Microsoft released Cumulative Update 4 for ConfigMgr 2012 R2 on the 3rd of February 2015, aligning with the SP1 current Cumulative Update revision number. If you didn’t know, SP1 and R2 are two entirely different code-forks in the System Center 2012 Configuration Manager product and each get their own unique update, with R2 going beyond SP1 in terms of features and functionality, here’s the highlight of the areas that...

As the title suggests Cumulative Update 4 for Configuration Manager 2012 R2 was just released. As luck would have it I’m in the middle of a new implementation so I installed it and thought I would share the experience. I’ll be honest the process is much the same as any other cumulative update but I know some people want to run through what to expect up front. You can get the update here http://support.microsoft.com/kb...

As the title suggests, this post is about automatic creation of and Endpoint Protection policy for System Center servers and clients. It seems odd to me as a consultant that we would make recommendations on antivirus exclusions but each time a new en...

The following Get-WMIObject query will return all Task Sequences that are deployed against a device in ConfigMgr 2012. Feed in a variables. $ResourceName = 'targeted device' $SiteServer = 'hostname of the site server' $SiteCode '3 digit site code' Then run the following command: Get-WMIObject -ComputerName $SiteServer -Namespace root/SMS/site_$SiteCode-Query "SELECT di.* FROM SMS...

It's an easy one to miss, but by default, when creating Task Sequence Media, the ability to run unattended is not enabled. So you power up your device to see the 'Welcome to the Task Sequence Wizard' screen. Normally with boot media an engineer would be on site using the ISO but there are occasions where the boot media could be used and engineer involvement is not required. So you need the ability to...

Whilst ConfigMgr 2012 does not officially support the installation of Windows 10 via OSD it can still be used to deploy the OS. Download the latest technical preview from the Microsoft website here . I will be installing the x64 release in this blog post. Add the Operating System Image Copy the install.wim file from the ISO's source folder. Paste into your source location for OSD content. In the...

This blog post will explain how you can dynamically assign machine variables to a computer object in a ConfigMgr 2012 using a simple PowerShell script. My starting block was the code featured at http://www.scapaot.de/blog/?p=34 I wanted to be ab...

Look out, the Windows Management User Group (WMUG) have another Clinic set for the 27th of January 2015 between 8:30PM and 9:30PM GMT. I’m looking forward to this one, as usual we’ll have a fun bunch of guest speakers attending, and the session starts with the subject authoring books , with guest speaker Martyn Coupland answering questions and talking about his experience of writing his own book System Center Configuration...

When attempting to run a PowerShell script via Orchestrator to connect to the ConfigMgr site server the following error was generated. 'The following exception occurred while retrieving the type name hierarchy: "The RPC server is unavailable. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800706BA)"' WMI ports were open and the required Windows services were running. To resolve the problem the service account running...

This turned up in my mailbox today, Enterprise Client Management MVP participation renewal email! The year behind us, what a blast, with so much action in the ConfigMgr space, the ECM MVP programme losing Wally Mead but gaining Cathy Moya, the onset of our journey towards Cloud technologies, which Microsoft is upping the Ante on big time, I was busy with custom tooling for ConfigMgr, even found time to write a commercial...

Although perhaps not strictly a management topic, this issue arose on a recent enterprise mobility project involving Intune for Windows Mobile and DA for corporate laptops. It’s been going on a long time and it’s still not fixed, suffice to say that this is not a happy combination of technologies. Firstly some terminology… NCSI - Network Connectivity Status Indicator This is the thing that determines whether or not you...

Strange goings on whilst working on a Task Sequence in SCCM 2007. One of the driver packages wasn't applying to the end device. The WMI query checked out ok but the device booted up without any of the drivers applied. Checking the SMSTS.log I noticed that the driver package step was marked as disabled. However looking at the Task Sequence the step wasn't disabled. To remedy the problem, I disabled...

Via the SCCM Console, the Deployment ID for a deployment is not visible by default. To enable this go into the Monitoring workspace. Right click the menu bar and choose Deployment ID from the list. The Deployment ID's are now visible. Via PowerShell you can use the Get-CMDeployment cmdlet. Entering Get-CMDeployment will return all deployments. You can filter via a specifc ID using the command: Get-CMDeployment...

Well, hello everyone! it’s pleasure to be blogging here on WMUG… Rob and the team here have been kind enough to let me in and have given me this platform and I plan to use it! So, an introduction is in order… My name is Matt White and I work as a technical architect for a UK systems integrator. I am a systems management specialist, starting with SMS 1.2 back in 1998 and finding my way through to the current status quo...

I’ve only gone and blown the bloody doors off! Well that’s a quote famously uttered by Michael Caine from one of my favourite movies, aging a tad now, like the actor, the Italian Job, which has nothing to do with this posting at all, Saturday humour :-) So, what did I do, well Inbox Monitor got some dev loving, it is now at Version 1.4.1 and includes the following: Ability to connect to a Primary, Secondary or Management...

The problem with reviewing a book is that you, if you’re fair, you need to commit to reviewing all related ones otherwise you’re at risk of being selective and possibly looking a bit biased. I’m guilty of this because to date all I’ve reviewed is Kent Agerlunds master piece “Mastering the Fundamentals”, which, I consider to be the go to book for tooling up on ConfigMgr quickly, a benchmark for all books to aspire to be...

Last night I was nearly out of my famous luck, I’d accidently deleted the wrong Computer Association for an OSD build that had successfully completed on a VIP’s laptop, only to find that some software (Non-MS Disk Encryption) was installe...

In the following series of blog posts I will introduce you to C#, Visual Studio and the ConfigMgr SDK, and show you how to produce your own custom tooling easily. The motivation behind this series of postings is to enable you to create community tools or bespoke tooling to assist you in your day-to-day ConfigMgr role, and thus to enhance the Community overall, as hopefully you’ll produce the very next best tool and we...