Scambler

New Whitepaper – How to protect Hyper-V with DPM 2010

2010-02-17T14:03:00Z

There is a new white paper on how to protect Hyper-V using DPM 2010 Extract from the DPM blog on TechNet 'Over the next several weeks, we are pre-releasing several whitepapers around DPM 2010’s Release Candidate. The first WP to be released is about how to protect Microsoft Virtualization environments – including Hyper-V R2, Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005 R2 sp1. DPM 2010 is a key part of the Microsoft Virtualization story, as the backup and recovery solution for Hyper-V by Microsoft...(read more)

Certification

2010-01-21T13:34:00Z

For a while now I have been thinking about updating my Microsoft certification and have finally got round to starting. After a bit of research I have found that there have been some changes in the different levels of certification that are offered by Microsoft, the main one is that the MCSE certification is no longer available and there is now a whole plethora of different paths to choose from in the journey to gaining certification. I will blog more as I travel the long path to certification, but...(read more)

How do I prevent the System Center Configuration Manager console from downloading the TechCenter home page

2009-12-29T12:06:00Z

When the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 console is running on a server with a connection to the Internet, the top node in the console automatically connects to the Microsoft TechNet site to display the System Center Configuration Manager TechCenter. In Configuration Manager 2007 SP1, you can modify the registry to prevent the console from contacting the Internet to display the TechCenter page. This applies only to Configuration Manager 2007 SP1 and later. To prevent the System...(read more)

Elevation PowerToys for Windows

2009-12-23T15:09:09Z

I was looking for an easier way to elevate the execution of programs, when I came across this blog post…. Elevation Gadget 2.0...(read more)

Capture CD and SCCM 2007

2009-12-18T16:19:31Z

I have been asked this question a few times now, so thought I would blog the answer. How do I create a capture CD (Capture Media) in Systems Center Configuration Manager 2007 Under Operating System Deployment. Right click on Task Sequence and choose "Create Task Sequence Media". In the wizard you have three choices. 1. Stand-alone media 2. Bootable media 3. Capture media...(read more)

Windows 7 N, What is the N?

2009-12-18T15:27:00Z

I am working on a Windows 7 build at the moment, and noticed that it is possible to get Windows 7 N, this obviously leads to the question, what does the 'N' stand for? I have found out that European law demands Microsoft offer these confusing 'N' editions if Windows 7 and here is the reason why..... In 2004, the European Commission fined Microsoft a record €497m under an antitrust ruling. The Commission concluded that with a near-monopoly in the operating system market, Microsoft's...(read more)

PXE Boot fails with SMSPXE.LOG error No Boot Action for Device (.........) found"

2009-12-04T17:37:00Z

This issue is normally caused because the advertised task sequence to the client has no Boot Image associated with it. To fix the problem you need to associate a boot image with the task sequence by following the steps below. · Right click on the affected Task Sequence and choose Properties. · Click on the Advanced Tab. · Make sure that the option "Use a boot image:" is checked and that a Boot Image is selected. Once you do this, Operating System Deployment should work...(read more)

Failed to resolve selected task sequence dependencies. Code(0x80040102)

2009-11-06T10:42:00Z

If you are trying to capture an image, you might see the following The client boots into the initial boot environment with the SCCM splash screen, then preparing network connections appears briefly - this all disappears, then the client reboots - first step is to re-run the advertisement and press F8 when the SCCM splash screen is up, have a look at the SMSTS.LOG, you will see Found 0 DPs in subnet, 0 DPs in local site, and 0 DPs in remote location Failed to resolve selected task sequence dependencies...(read more)

More on Window 7 and Server 2008 R2 RTM

2009-07-27T18:22:00Z

Windows 7 Release Dates August 6th Independent Software and Hardware Vendors TechNet Subscribers Developers with MSDN Subscription August 7th Volume License Customers with Software Assurance August 16th Microsoft Partner Program Gold/Certified Members August 23rd Microsoft Action Pack Subscribers September 1st Volume License Customers without Software Assurance October 22nd Public Winders Server 2008 R2 Release Dates July 29th OEM's August 14th Independent Software and Hardware Vendors TechNet...(read more)

Windows 7 Has Been Released to Manufacturing - woohoo

2009-07-22T21:22:20Z

Read the article from the Windows Team Blog...(read more)

Global Support On Click and a worried sister

2009-07-13T14:44:40Z

I just received a phone call from a very worried sister. She had just received a phone call from a company called Global Support On Click. They explained to her that there was a problem with her computer, which of course they could fix, all she had to do was turn her computer on and let them connect to it. She immediately panicked, took their phone number and said she would ring them back. As normal, the first thing she does when she has any questions about her computer is ring her little brother...(read more)

Windows Azure Platform

2009-06-23T15:15:24Z

Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Useful Links · What is the Azure Services Platform? · Why Use the Azure Services Platform? · Wiki - Windows Azure Platform · Windows Azure · ...(read more)

Hyper-V How To: Monitor Hyper-V R2 VMs in a Sidebar Gadget

2009-06-22T14:52:01Z

I have been rebuilding my SCCM test environment recently, it all runs on Hyper-V and have been looking for an easy way to monitor the Hyper-V boxes, have a look at this Sidebar Gadget , this fits the bill nicely. I am going to install this later today....(read more)

ConfigMgr 2007 Distribution Points Load Testing

2009-05-15T12:40:00Z

Recently I have been looking in to DP load testing, I found this excellent article on a technet blog At Microsoft, we have 280,000+ client machines that are managed worldwide and in our past life we were planning to scale our service to other companies client machines as well. As part of the platform team responsible for ensuring that our ConfigMgr 2007 infrastructure could scale to support hundreds of thousands of clients (and even millions), we had to find a way to solve a rather non-trivial mechanism...(read more)

Upgrade to SCCM fails to remove SMS_SQL_MONITOR service

2009-04-17T15:17:00Z

I was upgrading a SMS 2003 SP3 site server to SCCM SP1 earlier and notice that the SMS_SQL_Monitor service was not removed. This is a know issue when upgrading from SMS 2003 SP2/SP3 to SCCM SP1 (I believe it only occurs in this one instance) The fix is to manually remove the SMS_SQL_Monitor component after the upgrade. You can do this two ways. Remove the service from the command line, for example sc delete SMS_SQL_Monitor Delete the component directly from the registry Reg Delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE...(read more)