I'm Rob Marshall, a consultant who specialises in the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager product. I like to share, i do so by blogging and helping out when I can in the MS SMS newsgroups and participating in the ConfigMgr MVP program.
I was awarded and joined the program in 2009. It'd be an understatement to say it has to be one of the best experiences an IT engineer can have, if they really enjoy specialising in a product.
My biggest weapon for troubleshooting is, my formidable knowledge, no, only joking, you, the community. I find if I cannot answer a question, then I can usually find the answer from using Bing\Google, pouring over the documentation, and if that doesn't work, tinkering in mine or someone elses virtual lab.
The blogs pretty much about ConfigMgr, but it is also a platform for me to express my random urges to display something I've stumbled across, and that I imagine would entertain you or what not as equally as it did me.
Just finished the process of upgrading a Central SMS2003 (SQL2000) Site server to ConfigMgr 2007 (SQL 2005) ... I've never stared so intently at a wizard as it plodded through its tasks in all my life ... was dreading a failure occuring, that'd require a rollback taking several hours of work to accomplish. Had a real bad feeling about it ... but ... it ... upgraded!
I learnt something new about SQL upgrades ... We had, for whatever reason, a database called MASTER_XXXX attached to the Site server. It is not the SYSTEM database called MASTER ... However, the SQL 2005 upgrader must of performed a wildcard match on MASTER, which yielded MASTER_XXXX, causing the upgrader to bail out due to not finding system-related objects in MASTER_XXXX. A simple solution, drop SYSTEM_XXXX, but, I didn't expect the SQL upgrader to wildcard match a SYSTEM database!
Well on the way to replacing SMS2003 with ConfigMgr, we already have a pure ConfigMgr (not an upgrade) Hierarchy here, so we'll have our second one shortly, multi-tenancy can be fun :-)
After using SMS2003 Console, I'm glad to see it gone! I did like it during its heyday but, times a moved on as they say ;-) Operations in the SMS2003 Console are a nightmare once you end up with hundreds if not thousands of entries in the nodes. Anyone that has spent time in there will understand the frustration I speak of, which mostly pivots around not having search filters funnily enough, and always exporting or trying to type object names in one letter at a time and mostly failing hehe.