Steve Rachui:
My previous blog entry discussed how to configure unknown computer support in SCCM 2007 R2 - but how exactly does it work? I was curious so dug in a bit. Let's start by reviewing the logs from an 'unknown' system that has booted from a CD configured for 'unknown' computer support and walk through the imaging process step by step.(
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Steve Rachui: One of the new features in SCCM 2007 R2 is support for OSD deployments to 'Unknown' Computers - computers that do not exist in the SCCM database. This is a feature that did exist in previous releases of OSD (SMS 2003) but was removed for security and safety reasons. There are specific environments where having the ability to image 'unknown' computers is beneficial so it was again added to R2.
Before using this feature stop to consider that this can introduce unwanted image deployments to the environment. If enabled, a system booting into the OSD environment, whether through boot media or PXE (more on that in a minute) will be able to access the SCCM environment and download images. If there are any mandatory image deployments targeted to the 'unknown' system the image deployment starts immediately and the existing data on the systems hard drives is removed! You don't want to be the one to accidentally cause the CEO's system to get wiped with a new image so be sure you use this feature appropriately! :)(
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This guide targets key information to bring your infrastructure up to date, thereby enhancing user experience and delivering business benefits. Find out how new features like Application Virtualization management support and support for Windows Server® 2008 clients will assist decision making in the planning of your Configuration Manager infrastructure. Follow detailed steps and graphics as you redesign your infrastructure, examining roles to be deployed and upgrade strategies to be used, along with designing sites and hierarchies.
Use this guide to determine the scope of the services to be provided and choose to partially or completely redesign your infrastructure. Have confidence in knowing that the steps in each phase are described in detail and that the necessary tools are provided to manage the process.
Infrastructure Planning and Design streamlines the planning of a Configuration Manager infrastructure by:
· Defining the technical decision flow through the planning process.
· Listing the decisions to be made and the commonly available options and considerations.
· Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics.
· Framing decisions in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive alignment with the appropriate business landscape.
Additional Infrastructure Planning and Design series guides are available as beta releases on the Connect Web site. They are open beta downloads. See below for instructions on how to access the beta guides.
To join the Infrastructure Planning and Design Beta, follow these steps:
1. Visit the
Infrastructure Planning and Design Beta on the Microsoft Connect Web site.
2. Sign in using a valid Windows Live ID to continue to the Invitations page.
3. Scroll down to Infrastructure Planning and Design.
Scenario:
WSUS 3.0 SP1 installed. The domain has a group policy configuring windows update with the correct WSUS server URL.
Symptoms:
Your client computers are not showing up in the WSUS console.
Another case is when you register a client, it "overrides" the information about another client previously registered. In other words, your WSUS server sees a client A, then you register a client B, and on the server the information about A was lost and the information about B is displayed, almost as if it was an override.
Daniel Savage: Yesterday the PerformancePoint team released a sample solution that shows how to build cubes from the Operations Manager DW and then build balanced IT scorecards using Office PerformancePoint server from these cubes.
The solution contains the queries to pull from the OperationsManagerDW using SSIS, the samples cubes and sample scorecards.
The solution can be found on
www.microsoft.com/BI and
www.microsoft.com/PerformancePoint
This moves the quality data we collect in OpsMgr into the hands of the BI Analyst and the suite of BI tools that SSAS/PerformancePoint support.
Although our documentation is XML-based, we use Microsoft Word as our editor, and Word likes “smart quotes” – which has resulted in a problem for the Copy Code section in our new step-by-step topic for Windows Server 2008 CA. Smart quotation marks are also known as curly (and typographer's or book) quotes, with an example being in the preceding sentence. The text used for the inf file should have used "straight quotation marks", which I’m learning are also known as standard quotes, dumb quotes, typewriter quotes, and even ambidextrous quotes. Amazing how such a small mark can have so many names, and cause so many problems …
So what is the problem exactly? Where we have Subject = “CN=The site code of this site server is
” - it should be Subject = "CN=The site code of this site server is ". And similarly, the following example should be Subject = "CN=The site code of this site server is A01".
When you use smart quotes in the inf file instead of straight quotes, this subtle but important difference results in CertReq displaying a Certificate Request Processor error The string contains an Invalid X500 name attribute key, oid, value or delimiter, 0x80092023 (-2146995597). That error message isn’t terribly helpful in identifying the problem, but if you then open the file again with a text editor such as Notepad (not Word!), you will see that the quotation marks are replaced with strange characters. Simply delete the strange characters and replace them with quotation marks in your text editor, and they will then save as "straight quotes".
Michael Niehaus: There have been some blog postings talking about how to add the Hyper-V integration components into Windows PE. The first from Mike Sterling, available at http://blogs.msdn.com/mikester/archive/2008/05/30/using-the-hyper-v-integration-components-in-winpe.aspx, talks about the manual way of going about this. Then the Deployment Guys, specifically David Hornbaker, talked about how to do this with MDT 2008 in his posting at http://blogs.technet.com/deploymentguys/archive/2008/06/12/adding-hyper-v-integration-components-to-winpe-using-mdt-2008.aspx. But with MDT 2008 Update 1, we can improve this process and fix some of the challenges that David alludes to in his post.
Wes Miller: For the past two installments of this column, I've been exploring Windows Deployment Services (WDS). I began by looking at the history of Pre-boot eXecution Environment (PXE)-based deployment tools from Microsoft, followed by an overview of WDS. This month I'll delve into some advanced topics—
WDSUtil (the powerful command-line utility for WDS), the WDS Image Store, WDS logging, and working with multicast functionality in WDS for Windows Server® 2008.
When Remote Installation Services (RIS) shipped in Windows® 2000 and Windows Server 2003, it was never as feature-rich as many would have liked. Three areas in particular stand out:
* Performance (more scalable deployment)
* Logging/auditing
* Command-line automation
You'll see as we proceed through this month's column that with the initial release of WDS, and more specifically with WDS in Windows Server 2008, significant advances were made on each of these fronts.(continue at source)
In case you missed the first two installments on WDS, here they are:
Like all engineering groups at Microsoft, after shipping a version of a product, we move on to building the next version. And like all other product groups, the SCMDM team is committed to delivering product updates that improve the quality and experience for our customers and partners. We continually focus on enhancing security, increasing reliability, and simplifying administration. MDM is no exception. Since shipping SCMDM 2008 we have been working on new features and fixes or Mobile Device Manager. We thought you’d like to hear the latest, so here is an update on what you will see coming with SP1.
System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 Service Pack 1 will deliver improved performance and scalability, increased reliability, and an expanded set of supported topologies.
The key new features of SP1 are support for multiple instance, PIN reset, and support for running with Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Domain Services.(continue at source)
Matt Royer: Microsoft has just released two additional hotfixes that address issues with System Center Configuration Manager SP1 and vPro/AMT Out of Band Management. Please reference the following WIKI for a comprehensive list of required software bundles and hotfixes for SCCM SP1 and vPro/AMT Out of Band Management: http://communities.intel.com/openport/docs/DOC-1897
System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (KB955355):
* Description: A distinguished name that contains more than 100 characters and that is discovered from Active Directory for an AMT host causes the SMS_EXECUTIVE service to crash in System Center Configuration Manager 2007
* URL: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955355
System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (KB956337):
* Description: System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 is unable to remove AMT user ACLs during the provisioning process for AMT 2.x computers
* URL: http://support.microsoft.com/KB/956337
| 18 Sep '08 - 07:20 | kenneth van surksum | 
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