Monday, October 6, 2008

Helping others with SCCM Errors

I work for The Texas A&M University System Offices (TAMUS) in College Station, TX. We have many universities and Agencies that report directly to us. The closest is Texas A&M University (TAMU), just down the road. Since we are so close we tend to help each other not only in IT but other projects. When I was hired by TAMUS in 2005 I was asked if I could learn SMS 2003 and manage their systems. Well not only did I learn but I became somewhat of the the regional expert and even presented at MMS 2008. I routinely help IT admins at TAMU as they implement SMS/SCCM as well as if they have it implemented and they would like some help with some part of the application.

I recieved an email today from one of the IT admins that had tested SCCM 2007 and was now moving to the actual installation phase. On his Windows 2008 Site server box he attempted to install SCCM 2007 SP1 on a Domain computer only to have an error (Domain Membership)... his computer "needed to be part of a domain."

So I started with some general questions and it struck me that possibly the firewall was on between the systems and it couldn't determine the domain it was on. After having him reconfigure his firewall on the SQL box and the Site server it was able to install. Now we are working to move him into Native mode. Since I was the first to move to SCCM I had already work with the Enterprise group to configure the Certificates for Native and Out of Band Mangement point. I think right now there are about 4 or 5 SCCM servers and 2 SMS servers left over at TAMU. It has been my goal for the last couple of years to get the community of SMS/SCCM IT people together so everyone can learn about it and see how to implement it. I even had them watch my MMS 2008 presentation before I left to give me pointers. In the next 1 or 2 years the campus will modify its AD structure pulling all the domains in to a single domain with departmental OUs and that means a change of how we utilize SCCM. I would hope by that time we can all work together on the single SCCM structure and bring all the computers together. Talk about a challange. Thank you for allowing me to assist you with SMS/SCCM. For every problem we work on, I learn something and I hope they learn something as well.