Friday, October 30, 2009

MMS 2010 Call for Sessions

Well MMS is a month earlier this year, it usually falls on my wedding anniversary :(

Well call for sessions is now open!!!

https://www.mms-2010.com/CFT/default.aspx

So not only was I wrong about the day....I was wrong about the month!!!

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

ConfigMgr Sp2 and R3 Webcast

Did you want to get in on the ground floor and learn about the changes and advances in Sp2 and R3 here is your chance.

On Tuesday, November 03, 2009 12:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
TechNet Webcast: Technical Overview: System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 and R3

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032428200&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

MMs 2010 Registration

Registration opens for MMS 2010 on November 3, 2009.

If you want to stay in the Venetian Hotel or with the Palazzo Hotel you need to book early!
If you think you want to present but you still want to attend if you don't then go ahead and register. If you become a presenter then they will credit your registration and hotel fees.

Nov 20th might be close to when the Call for Sessions opens, that is my guess. Just keep watching the mms site: http://www.mms-2010.com/ or the www.myitforum.com pages for more information.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Win 7 day and ConfigMgr Sp2 Day

Well we know that today is the official release day for Win 7. There is a buzz that today Sp2 for ConfigMgr 2007 (SCCM) will also be release. Since it is still only 6AM over in Redmond, I can assume it won't be pushed to the web for a few more hours. Once it goes live I will add the link to this page.


ConfigMgr SP2
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3318741A-C038-4AB1-852A-E9C13F8A8140&displaylang=en

Quicktime 7.6.4

If you have deployed Quicktime either virtually or physically you have noticed that Apple slipped in a new application Apple Application Support. I am not quite sure what this application does but it won't work without it now.

When you virtualize Quicktime it will not pull in this new application by default.
While this is run during the sequecing it isn't capture into the virtual file structure. C:\program files\common files\Apple\Apple Application Support

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Uninstalling when you don't have an MSI

Many times you need to remove software from the clients but how do you do that when you installed it using an EXE?

Well the answer is quite simple, msiexe /x {GUID}

Where GUID is pulled from the registry of the client. If you look in the Resource explorer of the machine and find the software you want to remove then scroll over to the right it will have the GUID. This can found in the programs Registry settings also.

Lets look at Adobe Air uninstall key:

Adobe Air:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{00203668-8170-44A0-BE44-B632FA4D780F}

Uninstall string:MsiExec.exe /I{00203668-8170-44A0-BE44-B632FA4D780F}
------------------------------

Sometimes you can look in the Software section of the program such as for Adobe Reader
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\9.0\Installer
ENU_GUID:{AC76BA86-7AD7-1033-7B44-A91000000001}

Eitherway you now have several ways to find the uninstall method for the application.

It doesn't always work but at least you now have a starting point

Friday, October 16, 2009

Boundaries, Boundaries, Boundaries

I don't think it is expressed enough how critical boundaries are to your site. I know I have bloged about it before. It happened again that another administrator at my University selected the campus AD as their boundary instead of their AD Site name or something else. This caused all machines in the AD to pull into his All Systems collection (not that he had permisson to perform any action on the machines). I discovered it after Patch Tuesday when machines wouldn't patch or do anything. Now it looks at first that the MP or IIS is just not working correctly. After watching my patch status I could see that "some" of the machines would patch so obviously it was "kinda" working. It then occured to me that I had something similar happen about 6 months ago. On a client I opened the LocationServices.log file and sure enough it was saying that it's MP was xxxx.foo.com instead of aaaa.foo.com. A quick email to the admin and the problem was solved. I went over and showed him some key settings on his site that should be set. Of course it is like drinking water from a fire hose. I showed him key things and points. I think I overwhelmed him more than helped but ConfigMgr is something you need to get into slowly and in our enviroment that means that a single person is managing the entire ConfigMgr enviroment and doing other IT work, making learning slow and hard sometimes.

Both times this happened it was due to a brand new site coming up. It isn't a big deal and easily corrected but this brings home how important proper boundaries are to the site. We had similar issues when parts of the camps were on SMS 2003 as well. I know I saw a quicksetup guide by a ConfigMgr admin and I need to go find it and see where they have boundaries in the list and at what importance level. There needs to be a key set of configuration changes that must be made once the site is online, boundaries should be near the top, if not #1.

I did get a kick out of see the SCCM Unleashed book on his desk, written in part by several MVPs. I finally have my own copy to read. I did notice I am on page 1111 under free tools. That was a surprise to me. I had no idea it was there.

Friday, October 9, 2009

MMS 2010 call for sessions coming soon

If you are thinking about presenting at MMS 2010 (http://www.mms-2010.com/) you need to start thinking of topics. My prediction is that they will open between the 12 and 19 of November with the cut off date around December 17th. This is only a prediction but should be pretty close. Once they open I will post the link. "Many will enter, few will be chosen" Think about a topic in ConfigMgr that a large group would be interested in and has a high value. It could be a simple or complex topic. Isn't necessary to have a demo during the presentation but it is always nice to break it up.
If you don't feel comfortable about being on stage by yourself then find a partner. They do have a coach there that you can take classes and hopefully improve your stage presence. I speak from personal experience that it can be a bit overwhelming to stand there and see hundreds of your peers staring back. Good luck and happy thinking!!!

Change cache location

Sometimes you have a cache folder needs to move because of space issues

To do this at install time you need to use the SMSCACHEDIR attribute:
CCMSetup.exe SMSCACHEDIR="D:\sccm\cache"
Will force the client to install the cache folder to the D drive in a new folder

Maybe the client is already installed but you want to change the folder. Here is a VbScript that you can push down to the client. This takes a fraction of a second to run on the client so they are not affected by the change. Be aware that Cache cannot have any advertisment that is active. If so then you can't move the cache.

--------------------------
Dim oUIResourceMgr
Dim oCache
Set oUIResourceMgr = CreateObject("UIResource.UIResourceMgr")
Set oCacheInfo = oUIResourceMgr.GetCacheInfo
oCacheInfo.Location = "D:SCCM\Cache"
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