ConfigMgr 2012

Best of MMS UK – Tuesday 21st of May 2013

Rob Marshall - MVP — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:44:36 GMT

The Best of MMS UK registration is closed now and there will be an epic amount of folk there as well as partners. I’ll be attending so if you see me and want to say hi just pull me up, always happy to chat and meet.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/uktechnet/archive/2013/05/10/reminder-the-best-of-mms-uk-2013.aspx

Unsticking Clients from unavailable Distribution Points

Rob Marshall - MVP — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:45:00 GMT

I was at a customer site recently and they were simulating a data centre failure as part of their Disaster Recovery plan. They replicate the Site server as a VM across to another data centre in real-time and fail over to it when the main Site server is taken offline, and during the testing they came across a problem with Clients sticking to Distribution Points that were made unavailable as part of the Disaster Recovery exercise. In reality the Distribution Points should also be replicated and switched over too, but this wasn’t done. The problem was that the Clients would not install anything that had already been deployed to them but had not yet been installed, the deployments were on the Client but the Applications content had not yet been downloaded.

This Distribution Point stickiness is a well-known feature of ConfigMgr going back a long time, the Client will select a Distribution Point containing the content it requires from the provided list of Distribution Points and try to contact it, at which point the Client will realise the Distribution Point is down, note it as a recoverable error as opposed to an unrecoverable error and it will then attempt to retry the Distribution Point for up to 8 hours before moving on to the next Distribution Point in the list. This is to give the administrators a chance to recover the Distribution Point. If the next Distribution Point is down, there’s another long wait until a Distribution Point that is available is found and downloads begin. This Client had 3 Distribution Points and unfortunately the two failed Distribution Points where at the top of the list resulting in a 16 hour wait before content for existing Deployments could be downloaded and the applications installed. Obviously, this induced a lengthy wait time before the Clients begin downloading content correctly, and the customer wanted to get around this quickly.

There are a couple of workarounds for this:

Boundary change on the Site server if it is still available
Roberts special magic!

If you remove the failed Distribution Point from a boundary group, this will result in the Client ignoring the unavailable Distribution Point and going to a Distribution Point that is still servicing the Clients boundaries. A very simple solution, it requires a change in the ConfigMgr Console to remove the Distribution Point from the Boundary Group, or on specific boundaries if you have configured the Site that way, and adding the boundary to the Site system hosting the available Distribution Point. Once DR is complete you’d have to change all this back to how it was before the outage took place. This solution requires several “moves” so to speak, it’s not much effort and it works but I like solutions that are simple and contain fewer moves.

Here’s an example of a Boundary group where you would remove the unavailable Distribution Point:

Once the Clients talk to the Management Point again they will update the list of Distribution Points that service the Clients boundary, it’ll ignore the Distribution Point no longer servicing them and select a new Distribution Point to retrieve the content from. The Client will check policy based on the Client Settings (Client Policy) applied to the Client, with the default being every 60 minutes. Client Settings in ConfigMgr 2012 can be defined on a Collection basis rather than being a site-wide setting as it was in ConfigMgr 2007, so depending on how you have set this up the Client will do a policy update based on the default value mentioned or any custom settings that you have applied.

In theory you could also change the existing Site system containing the unavailable Distribution Point from fast connection to slow connection so that the available Distribution Point servicing the Clients boundaries takes precedence, I haven’t tested this solution but it also seems very viable. This again is simple, and has far fewer moves to complete the task. I’ll test this at some point to see if the Client behaves itself and that this is a workable solution. It should do and has fewer moves required to achieve the end result but assumes the Primary is available for the administrator to make the changes.

Changing boundaries assumes the Primary is still available, the SMS Provider is accessible and the Console can establish a session to actually make the changes. If the Primary was unavailable and some Distribution Points that could service the Client for content are online, the Client would hang around for 8hrs+ per unavailable Distribution Point until it found the available Distribution Point and as an administrator nothing could be done until the Primary is back in operation at which point you can make changes, but I’d hazard a guess if the Primary is back no doubt the recovery of Distribution Points would also be not far behind it. In this scenario where the Primary has not returned to operational status, to accelerate things you will need a different way to motivate the Client into moving onto the next Distribution Point in its list until it has found an available Distribution Point, this is where the Magic comes into play!

Well it’s not really magic, I just wanted to keep you reading and get you down to here where the fun really begins!

If the Site is unavailable or you have a streak of derring-do in you and you’d like to leave the Site servers configuration intact you’ll have to think outside the box, and here’s the solution I came up with, it’s a pretty simple solution, you make a change in one place outside of ConfigMgr and in under an hour the Clients will select the online Distribution Point and proceed to download content. That kind of qualifies as magic!

How we achieve this is by changing the A record for the unavailable Distribution Point in DNS so that it points at a member server that is available. This tricks the Client into recognising the Distribution Point as being in an unrecoverable state, and thus, it will move onto the next Distribution Point in the list. Brilliant.

Below, I’ve produced some screenshots to assist with explaining the steps involved to achieve this result, but the shots are not taken from an environment where the problem is being reproduced fully. Instead, I’ve just taken shots of the relevant dialogues and shots of actual real logs that came from the client (their details stripped and replaced with some names of servers in my lab), so don’t worry if in the shots you don’t see Distribution Points listed and such stuff. Anyway if you are expecting a hand-holding through this solution then I think you’d better not continue, you should be familiar with all the moving parts involved and be able to understand this fully end-to-end.

Let’s go over what will happen:

Administrator changes Distribution Points A record in DNS to point at a different IP address
DNS replication takes place if there are multiple DNS servers in the environment
The Clients local DNS Cache eventually expires the A record and retrieves an updated one from its assigned DNS server
The ConfigMgr Client retries the Distribution Point and returns an unrecoverable error instead of a recoverable error, no further waiting will occur
The ConfigMgr Client immediately moves onto the next Distribution and repeats the same process if the Distribution Point is unavailable or it downloads the required content

Let’s go over how the Client handles DNS, the DNS Cache on every OS is managed automatically for us, and each entry in the local DNS Cache has a Time To Live and once the TTL has expired the A record is removed from the DNS cache on the Client and refreshed from the assigned DNS server. This works in our favour but also introduces some latency into the solution.

Here’s a shot of my DNS servers Zone properties showing the TTL and as you can see I have retained the MS defaults for the TTL which is 60 minutes, 3,600 seconds:

When my Client first looks up this Distribution Points A record, it retrieves this A record and puts it in the local DNS Cache, it counts down the TTL until it has expired.

Here’s a shot of a record in the local DNS Cache and as you can see it has 1,197 seconds left before the A record is flushed from the local DNS Cache and replaced with an updated A record from the assigned DNS server:

I flushed my DNS cache then pinged the FQDN to populate the local DNS Cache for this screenshot, you achieve this using IPCONFIG\FLUSHDNS and you view the local DNS Cache using IPCONFIG/DISPLAYDNS.

Notice the Time to Live (TTL) is displayed in seconds and repeated rendering using IPCONFIG/DISPLAYDNS will show the value decrementing. When the TTL has expired contact is made to the assigned DNS server(s) and a refreshed A record will be retrieved.

If you wanted you could expedite this process by manually flushing the local DNS Cache but this isn’t very practical to perform manually on many Clients. To flush the local DNS Cache use IPCONFIG/FLUSHDNS, the Clients DNS Cache will be flushed away and future name lookups will retrieve the latest A record from the assigned DNS server.

In theory you could create a Package\Program containing no content just a command line to flush the local DNS Cache then deploy it to your Clients so that they flush the DNS cache quickly, assuming the Primary is available, but it requires a lot of back-end fiddling, it requires new objects in ConfigMgr, a new deployment to all affected Clients. It is a viable way to speed things up if you needed to do so, but the costs in administrative time, the assumption the Primary is available and the latency in Clients picking up new Policy may make this an excessive process and when the Deployment fires on the Client it may coincide with the TTL expiring anyway. If your Clients checked for new Policy every 15 minutes this is doable I guess.

Here’s a shot of the A record for my Site server in the active DNS Zone for my domain, the A record is not from a Distribution Point but as I said these shots are there simply to point out the areas to head too:

You will see that the IP Address is pointing at the actual IP address of the unavailable Distribution Point.

It’s pretty obvious where you’d make the change of IP address, but just to ram it home here’s another screenshot:

The IP address you use must represent a server that is online otherwise you’ll remain pinned to the unavailable Distribution Point.

Once you have changed the IP address for the unavailable Distribution Point the A record will be replicated to the other DNS servers in your environment. If you have a lot of DNS servers this could also introduce latency into the solution while you wait for the A record to change on the DNS server the client is using for name resolution. You could in practice determine which DNS server or servers the Clients are using and make the change right there, then let it replicate from there out to the other DNS servers to speed things up.

After the TTL has expired for the A record in the Clients local DNS Cache, the A record is refreshed and the changed IP will be shown if you use IPCONFIG/DISPLAYDNS.

Ok now that’s the infrastructure changes made, now it is entirely on the ConfigMgr Client to realise that the Distribution Point is in an unrecoverable state.

Once the A record has been updated, what will happen is the Client will try to contact the unavailable Distribution Point but this time it will get a response from the member server using the specified IP address. And, when the Client attempts to connect to this IP address there will be a conflict because the name of the server isn’t correct, this induces an unauthorised error back to the Client which tricks it into thinking this is an unrecoverable error.

Here’s a shot of the list of Distribution Points containing the Content the Client wants, notice we have three Distribution Points listed, two of which, 01 and 02 are down\unavailable\off the network (in reality they were just VM’s switched off for this simulated DR exercise), 03 is our available Distribution Point:

Here’s a shot of the Client seeing that the Distribution Point returned an unauthorised error which induces the unrecoverable error we need to unpin from that Distribution Point:

At this point the magic has worked, we have forced the Client to note the Distribution Point as being in an unrecoverable state due to the unauthorised error being returned!

Here’s a shot of the Client immediately going to the next Distribution Point in the list. This Distribution Point is also down. Rinse and repeat as they say:

And here’s a shot of the Client moving onto the third Distribution Point in the list, this one is online, notice the lack of errors, this is an available Distribution Point and content transfer will begin immediately thereafter:

So, by making a change to just the A record for the unavailable Distribution Points we have unstuck the Client from the failed Distribution Points and forced it to move onto the available Distribution Point. We have effectively controlled default behaviour, behaviour we had no control over before without making changes on the Site server with regards to Boundary\Boundary Groups and Site systems containing Distribution Point roles that service those boundaries.

This solution allows us to step in and take control even if the Primary is offline and we are unable to make any changes to boundaries. If this was the case, without the magic above we’d have to recover the Primary to make the changes to the boundaries.

I guess I should sign off with the usual disclaimers that this is Magic and sometimes Magic can burn, so always go through this in a lab, in dev, pre-prod, whatever you have, and, if you have 10’s of thousands of Clients involved, there will be a lot of traffic generated towards the replacement IP address entered into the A record for the unavailable Distribution Points. If the Primary is still online it makes sense to enter it’s IP address into the unavailable Distribution Points A record, so as to not interfere with production services on the member server you choose for the IP address needed above.

I should also thanks Jon Rumens for letting me tijnker with his DEV environment to produce this solution, and also I’d like to call out this guy, Carlitog, who posted on the System Center 2012 Configuration Manager forums a solution for handling a boundary change if the Primary is down but you use remote SQL and have another SMS Provider available to leverage use to make changes via PowerShell. Check out the thread here.

Hope this article is helpful for you, or insightful et al.

WMUG Event - Software Updates Overview with Robert Marshall MVP

Rob Marshall - MVP — Mon, 13 May 2013 08:02:28 GMT

I’m running a session on Software Updates Management on the 23rd of May between 19:30 to 20:30 using LiveMeeting.

This is an online event that does not require an invitation, just turn up on the scheduled date and time.

Here’s the link the Events page on the Windows Management User Group website for more information.

See you there!

TechNet UK Article: How to Configure Alerts in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager

Rob Marshall - MVP — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 07:57:17 GMT

I wrote a little article for TechNet UK as a guest post where I go over the new Email Notifications mechanism in ConfigMgr 2012 SP1.

Check it out here

MS KB2823324 patch could cause loss of OS on next reboot if deployed

Rob Marshall - MVP — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 12:07:29 GMT

Lots of chatter out there on the web on this, Microsoft has pulled a patch, KB2823324, that is reportedly causing Windows OS’s not to boot properly or for application to not function correctly.

If you haven’t got this out into production yet, think it’d be a sensible precaution to remove it from any Deployment Packages and prevent any production instability until it is all resolved.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2823324

WMUG reporting point role installed at MMS 2013!

Rob Marshall - MVP — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:00:06 GMT

Our very own WMUG representative is at this years most awesome MMS 2013, Simon Skinner, CDM MVP, who will be tweeting and such like across the week, letting us know all the exciting stuff taking place.

Check out the WMUG MMS 2013 dedicated page.

We link you back to the myITforum MMS 2013 Guide, worth keeping an eye on if you are at the Summit, or trying to keep up over this week.

WMUG Virtual Event

Rob Marshall - MVP — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 21:23:55 GMT

Another WMUG webcast, this time from Satisnet and Secunia, click through to get more information on the event and how to register.

Overview:
Secunia CSI provides highly detailed software inventory including both programs and plug-ins. This inventory is in turn mapped to security intelligence related to the individual programs and plug-ins as well as details about vendor supplied security updates. The software can then automatically repackage these patches and push them to SCCM, allowing you to control, manage, and monitor the …

Agenda:
19:00 – 19:10 – Welcome
19:10 – 19:45 – Overview of Secunia CSI and System Center 2012 Configuration manager integration
19:45 – 20:00 – Q&A Session

When:
10th April, 2013 at 7PM GMT (convert timezone here)

Visit here to register for the event

Community Server and BOT registrations

Rob Marshall - MVP — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:22:00 GMT

UPDATED: Script modified to log results

Spam. Spam. Spam.

Here at WMUG we see a lot of Bots trying to register an account with us so they can get in and spam the site silly. For most website administrators it is an on-going chore separating out the wheat from the chaff so to speak, telling the real registrations apart from the fake ones. When we started up the User Group there was hardly any bot spam, but gradually over the years it built up; We were manually keeping on top of the account registrations, but it was becoming a time consuming and annoying chore.

We run Community Server on our web server which runs the Windows Management User Group website. I decided to do something about the build up of bots and had a look around, found a CAPTCHA plug-in and dropped it onto the registration page. From then on we saw a considerable reduction in bot registrations, that is for about 6 months, at which point they started to come back in large numbers. Obviously they were able to thwart CAPTCHA and pass right on by, clever bot-developers probably have their own database of responses to these CAPTCHA images.

I’d had enough of manually grooming these fake registrations again so, on went the thinking cap and I thought of a more practical approach to dealing with them. As does happen when I think a lot (attempt at humour, I know, don’t give up my day job), hey presto I came up with a neat way to bite into the problem, I call it the Bot-Killer script. Da daa daaah … I’ll let that sink in for a moment before I go over the process …. ready? Ok here goes …

Bot-Killer is essentially a PowerShell script that does the following:

Connects to your Community Server database
Retrieves a list of accounts pending registration
Does some voodoo magic and deals with the spam registrations – Just like that! That’s Magic!

Well, not quite, instead it continues with:

Pass the email address for each pending registration against an online email spam repository checking for a hit by using Internet Explorer automation jiggery-pokey
If I get a hit I’ll delete the registration by invoking a well-known and safe Stored Procedure used by the Community Server product itself to delete accounts

The online email spam repository is one managed by BotScout who I’d like to thank for exposing the search engine and for providing access to an up to date list on known spam email address.

Yep that strap-line is dead on the money.

It’s so easy to attach some automation around this site, a crafted URL and the response HTML contains a string you can search across to base detection on.

Here’s my email being checked and the resulting trigger string:

In the following shot we have a known bot email address:

It’s a bit of a give-away really, there are no results for my email address and 6 pages of data on the bot address, I’d take that as a successful bot detection!

So using BotScout (you could just as easily find another and figure out the URL and rejig the PowerShell to do it) I can uncover most of the bots registering, and so far I’ve nuked 100% of what we would have deleted, and left a registration that looks like it comes from a human being.

We haven’t had this up for long and not had anyone emailing us wanting to know why we delete their registration account, but so far so good.

Running the script hourly has given us a much stronger handle on this chore now, and administering registrations should become less traumatic for the administrator as a result. If you are browsing to implement, good luck and I hope this works as well for you as it seems to have done for us.

To get this working you’ll need to do the following:

Copy the script below into a file called BOTKILLER.PS1
Get a SQL user account created, you will need to know the password
Get a domain user account or a local account created, again knowing the password, essentially any account with enough rights to launch the PowerShell script and to run Internet Explorer
Modify the script and put in all your bits and bobs, I’ve wrapped comments in <> just replace those entirely with what the comment says
Set the script up as a Scheduled Task and configure the account the Task runs under as the chosen account
Test, run the task, visit your website, have any of the fake registrations been deleted?

I’ll skip the account creation party and not document it, instead I’ll just focus on the script and the Scheduled Task, leaving you to take care of the rest.

If you are out of luck and nothing happens after running the task I suggest a little troubleshooting, checking over your changes, verifying user account names and passwords, manually running the script and seeing if it produces sensible error output to act upon. Most of your issues with revolve around permission problems with the SQL account that the script uses to connect to the database, and the Domain user account or local account used to run the script. Nothing too difficult to work out if you do get it wrong. If you are getting language syntax errors it'll be because this was written for PowerShell V1, intentionally I may add, and you may benefit by reading the comments below for any changes I make, or head up fixing it yourself. All that aside, It shouldn’t take much to get this script working if it doesn’t get underway first time. Also keep in mind BotScout may change the URL or block this kind of usage at a later date, so if when you implement this it doesn’t work and bots begin to build up, check into this and switch over to another online email spam repository.

Here’s the PowerShell V1 source-code:

# By Rob Marshall - WMUG.CO.UK - March 2013
# No restrictions on use, re-use, re-purposing or re-presenting, go ahead share
$conn = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection
$conn.ConnectionString = "Data Source=<YOUR SQL SERVER>;MultipleActiveResultSets=True;Initial Catalog=<Community Server database name, usually CS>;uid=<A SQL USERNAME>;pwd=<THAT SQL USERS PASSWORD>"
$thedate = Get-Date ; Add-Content <PATH TO WHERE THE LOG FILE SHOULD RESIDE>\BotSpam.log "Opening Database at $thedate"
$conn.open()
$cmd = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand
$cmd.connection = $conn
$cmd.commandtext = "select UserID, Email from cs_users where UserAccountStatus = 0"
Add-Content d:\scripts\BotSpam.log "Executing Query"
$Resultset = $cmd.executenonquery()
$dr = $cmd.ExecuteReader()
Add-Content d:\scripts\BotSpam.log "Processing list"
$botcount = 0
while ($dr.Read()) {
$email = $dr.item("email")
$userid = $dr.item("userid")
$email = $email -replace "@", "%40"
$ie = new-object -com "InternetExplorer.Application"
$ie.navigate("http://www.botscout.com/search.htm?sterm=" + $email + "&stype=q")
$ie.visible = $false
#while ($ie.busy) {sleep -milliseconds 50}
while($ie.ReadyState -ne 4) {start-sleep -m 100}
$tempHTML = $ie.document.documentElement.innertext
$checkstring = $tempHTML -Match "Your search didn't return any matches"
if ($checkstring -eq 0) {
Add-Content d:\scripts\BotSpam.log "Bot found: $email $userid"
$SPROCcmd = new-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand("cs_User_Delete", $conn)
$SPROCcmd.CommandType = [System.Data.CommandType]::StoredProcedure
$SPROCcmd.Parameters.Add("@UserID",[system.data.SqlDbType]::VarChar) | out-Null
$SPROCcmd.Parameters['@UserID'].Direction = [system.data.ParameterDirection]::Input
$SPROCcmd.Parameters['@UserID'].value = $userid
$SPROCcmd.Parameters.Add("@ReassignUserName",[system.data.SqlDbType]::VarChar) | out-Null
$SPROCcmd.Parameters['@ReassignUserName'].Direction = [system.data.ParameterDirection]::Input
$SPROCcmd.Parameters['@ReassignUserName'].value = "anonymous"
$SPROCcmd.ExecuteNonQuery()
$botcount ++

}
$ie.quit()
}
Add-Content <PATH TO WHERE THE LOG FILE SHOULD RESIDE>\BotSpam.log "Completed, $botcount removed"
$dr.Close()
$conn.close()

Put this script into a sensible location on the server, call it BOTKILLER.PS1. The script could do with some logging being added, I’ll come back and update the code but for now the script is silent, just zaps the bots.

Now go ahead and setup a Scheduled Task with a re-occurring schedule, setting the repeat time to however often you want to run this script. I’ve set mine up to run hourly for 24 hours and to repeat each day with no end date.

I took some shots to show what it looks like, the server is running Windows 2003 so keep that in mind when configuring your Scheduled Tasks on a more modern OS.

Ok, make sure you are logged in with enough rights to create Scheduled Tasks and do the following:

Open a CMD prompt
Enter the following

SCHTASKS /CREATE /TN “BotKiller” /TR “C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\WINDOWSPOWERSHELL\V1.0\POWERSHELL.EXE <PATH TO FILE>\BOTKILLER.PS1” /SC HOURLY

After pressing enter It should prompt you for your password, go ahead and enter it
Now head to Control Panel and open Scheduled Tasks
Locate the new Task and get it’s properties up
Change the user to the domain user or local account you created for this purpose
Click Set password… and enter the password for the chosen account
All done, so click on OK.

It should look something like this:

Task Tab

Schedule Tab

Advanced Dialog

There you go, a pretty simple way to rig together a tool consisting of a script, a website and any pending approval account registrations on the Community Server web platform, so the ones being reported as known spam email addresses are automatically zapped. Simple. Enjoy.

ConfigMgr Cumulative Update 1 for Service Pack 1–Released

Rob Marshall - MVP — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 09:38:50 GMT

Cumulative Update 1 for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Service Pack 1 has been released.

This release is heaving with updates covering the Administrator Console, Site Systems, Device Management, Software Updates, Client and PowerShell.

As usual for Cumulative Updates, install SP1 CU1 into your test environment, perform rigorous testing before you put this into production.

Click below to head to the KB2817245 article for full details

Check out these additional PowerShell cmdlets:

Add-CMDistributionPoint
Import-CMAntiMalwarePolicy
Import-CMDriver
New-CMAppVVirtualEnvironment
New-CMMigrationJob
New-CMPackage
New-CMSoftwareUpdateAutoDeploymentRule
New-CMTaskSequence
New-CMTaskSequenceInstallUpdateAction
New-CMTaskSequenceMedia
New-CMUserDataAndProfileConfigurationItem
Remove-CMTaskSequenceInstallUpdateAction
Set-CMTaskSequenceGroup
New-CMTaskSequenceGroup
Remove-CMTaskSequenceGroup
Set-CMApplicationCatalogWebsitePoint
Set-CMAppVVirtualEnvironment
Set-CMClientPushInstallation
Set-CMClientSetting
Set-CMDistributionPoint
Set-CMDriver
Set-CMEndpointProtectionPoint
Set-CMEnrollmentPoint
Set-CMEnrollmentProxyPoint
Set-CMHierarchySetting
Set-CMManagementPointComponent
Set-CMOperatingSystemImageUpdateSchedule
Set-CMOutOfBandManagementComponent
Set-CMReportingServicePoint
Set-CMSite
Set-CMSoftwareUpdateAutoDeploymentRule
Set-CMSoftwareUpdatePointComponent
Set-CMStateMigrationPoint
Set-CMStatusSummarizer
Set-CMSystemHealthValidatorPointComponent
Set-CMTaskSequence
Set-CMTaskSequenceInstallUpdateAction
Set-CMUserDataAndProfileConfigurationItem
Start-CMDistributionPointUpgrade

MVPS HOSTS – Ad blocking via HOSTS file

Rob Marshall - MVP — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 13:17:57 GMT

This project is as old as I am LOL, every now and then get reminded to go visit for a revised HOSTS file.

So today I updated to catch up with the latest IP’s for those dodgy Trojan sites and Ad spammers. Go check this stuff out, it’ll block a lot in your browser for free.

Visit and download here

Thanks to the folks who maintain this HOSTS file, you rock!

WMUG Event - Netwrix–Change Reporter Suite recording is available

Rob Marshall - MVP — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:05:37 GMT

This week we had a virtual event with Netwrix, where Aidan Simister and Danny Murphy demonstrated a selection of core modules from their Change Reporter Suite. A pretty good overview all-round, with Aidan introducing the company and the products, while diving into the use cases for the Change Reporter Suite and handing over to Danny for live demo.

The audio is a bit choppy in this one, entirely my fault! I plugged in a web-cam earlier in the week, it had a microphone which I didn’t realise was recording, tut tut, it introduced a lot of ambient noise, a but fortunately I was able to clean up a fair amount of it in Camtasia 8. Well done to Aidan and Danny for handling the occassion ambient noise spike and carrying on.

Check out the WMUG Event page containing the recorded video here - http://bit.ly/YvNvaR

WMUG Video–Niall Brady from Windows-Noob.com demo’s CM12 BitLocker front-end HTA

Rob Marshall - MVP — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 13:27:32 GMT

While I was out in Seattle enjoying a fantastic MVP 2013 summit, I came across my buddy Niall Brady who was getting all excited about his new CM12 BitLocker front-end HTA (new, I think he’s reached Iteration 3 so not so new …), and we agreed to meet up in the evening to go over it. This all went to plan, and in a bustling hotel bar in Seattle we sat down, with food, beer and laptops in readiness to go over Niall''s awesome toy when I got the idea of recording the whole demo! So, with no tripod, working around the waitress, employing extreme shaky-cam technology (my hand!) and a Samsung Galaxy SIII mobile phone we set about running through the demo. I think this format, very off the cuff, it’s all about the content and not a smart slick presentation style, we hope you agree and enjoy the content in this video!

The Hotel bar was a bit noisy, I’ve tried to remove all audio excesses and left everything else as it was. It’s certainly watchable.

Click here to visit the WMUG Event page to view the video

Enjoy!

Robert Marshall – MVP ConfigMgr

WMUG Event - NetWrix - 26th Feb 2013 - 7PM GMT–Virtual

Rob Marshall - MVP — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:04:00 GMT

WMUG has a last minute event up, this one is for NetWrix, see the dedicated Event Page for more information.

Overview:

This session will offer an overview of a selection of core modules from their Change Reporter Suite. It will provide a brief overview of their product architecture along with a live product demonstration of their unique approach to AD Auditing, Granular AD roll back Group Policy and Exchange auditing.

Agenda:

19:00 - 19:10 - Welcome
19:10 - 19:45 –Introduction to NetWrix and suite of tools followed by a technical demonstration.
19:45 - 20:00 - Q&A Session

Click here to visit the WMUG Event Page for this event

ConfigMgr 2012–Download the documentation for easier search

Rob Marshall - MVP — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 21:52:21 GMT

Best to download the docs and review offline now, TechNet (not the ConfigMgr team) have ripped out Classic view which helped us fully expand all the collapsible nodes to enable CTRL-F for searching, now you’ll have to expand the appropriate node out and read\search from there which is going to be a PITA unless you already know your way around.

Download here, when you do download keep an eye on the date and make sure you have the latest version installed.

Keep an eye on the ConfigMgr Team Blog for announcements regarding documentation updates

CM12 Bitlocker HTA front-end by Niall Brady - Windows-noob.com

Rob Marshall - MVP — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:06:33 GMT

Just come back from a beer with fellow MVP Niall Brady during which he demonstrated his ultra-cool CM12 BitLocker HTA front-end. It’s midnight and I’ve got day 3 of the MVP summit to deal with so I’m going to cut this short so I can hit the sack, but will return next week for a proper review, and a video of Niall demonstrating the HTA. Keep in mind when you see the video, that we had a few beers, were seriously brain-scrambled from the jet-lag, and that we shot the video on a mobile phone in a busy bar and ran out of battery just as we were wrapping up, so don’t look forward to a clean sharp video; This is true MVP free styling at it’s best!

For now, if you haven’t seen this HTA then you should be clicking away at this link like your life depended on it, and in true Windows-noob style there’s a detailed guide to get you going.

Truly, this is some seriously smart tech Niall has produced, it’s an end-to-end solution for OSD migrations towards Win7\8 with BitLocker enabled. I walked away very impressed at what he’s done here.

Anyway time for me to hit the sack, check out the link above and look out for the video next week!