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.

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"
-------------------------------------