John Marcum at myITforum.com

ConfigMgr 2012 Docs Search On Page

jmarcum — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 23:29:00 GMT

If you are like me and you are really digging in to the documentation for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager you might find the documentation on Technet hard to read and impossible to search on page. Technet has changed the default view for the documentation from Classic to Lightweight. You can easily set this back to Classic using the preferences on any page of the documenation. Once you're back in Classic view you can simply "expand all" so that you can search the page.

Rebuild WMI On a List of Computers

jmarcum — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:35:00 GMT

We all know that a major headache keeping the SCCM client healthy is WMI getting broken. Attached is a zip file containing a batch file that can be executed against a list of machines using psexec. The file will remove all traces of the SCCM client, then rebuild WMI. This really should only be used in extreme cases but it's proved helpful to me. Simply list all of your computer names that you want to repair in a file called list.txt then run the command in the text file included in the attached zip.

The batch file, scripts etc are a compilation of items posted to the SMS list on myitforum.com. I would credit all the authors but I don't remember exactly who all took part in putting this together. Sorry about that.

Finding an Advertisement of Package Buried in Folders

jmarcum — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 12:24:00 GMT

Have you ever been digging through the console searching for a package or advertisement that you know is there somewhere but you just can't remember where? Or maybe you are just joining a company and you are not yet familiar with how they have organized things? I ran into this a lot. I reached out to John Nelson for help on this one and John provided me with two SQL queries which have served me well over the past couple of years. Normally I don't like ot share others' work but these are so handy I decided to post them with proper credit to John as being the author. I hope they help you as much as they've helped me.

You will find the two SQL queries in the attached text file. Just seperate them into two seperate files. They are easily manipulated to find a certain item.

Beginners Guide to Writing SCCM Reports

jmarcum — Thu, 19 May 2011 19:01:00 GMT

There are often questions on the forums about writing reports and SQL queries for SCCM. These are often people who have no SQL experience at all. There’s no easy way to learn to write these reports but I’m going to show you how I learned to do it and how I still do many of my reports today.

First open up SQL Management Studio and connect to your SQL server.

Next navigate to your SCCM database in Object Explorer, right click Views, and select New View…

Next on the Add Table box you want to select the Views tab. You will almost always want to add v_R_System before anything else. (v_R_System.Valid is also widely used). Select v_R_System and click Add.

Of course you will likely want info from more than just v_R_System view so add the other views as well. For a reference download Creating Custom Reports using SQL Views from Technet. For this example I’m keeping it simple and adding v_GS_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.

Now you will want to make your joins. This is very easy using this tool. Just drag and drop. For this scenario I will drag ResourceID from v_GS_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS over to ResourceID in v_R_System. You will notice a line shows the two views joined and a join statement has been created for you in the query.

Next simply check off some of the info you’d like to return in your results. For this example I will select the name of the computer and the display name of a program in Add/Remove programs.

It’s highly unlikely however you want to see everything in Add/Remove programs on every computer you have. If you do please ask Garth how many trees that will kill, he loves to analyze that for people. We will limit our results to show only the computers that have a particular item in Add/Remove programs but entering the product name in the Filter box and we’ll give our columns friendly names by adding those in the Alias box. We will also sort our results by computer name using Sort Order.

There you have it. A very simply report written for SCCM. Feel free to add as many views and columns as you’d like to add. Sometimes you’ll have to play around with the join types manually but this will work for most simple queries.

Identify Disabled AD Users in SCCM

jmarcum — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:23:00 GMT

I was presented with a challenge to find all of the users in SCCM that had been disabled in Active Directory. The key to this lies in this KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305144 From this we can see that a disabled account has a decimal value of 2. Problem is there's a lot of other values and they are cumulative. A little help from your favorite search engine, or a degree in advanced mathmatics, should show you that there's only two possible numbers that can mean an account is disabled. Those numbers are 514 and 66050.

To find all the users in SCCM that have been disabled in AD you would run this SQL query:

select Full_User_Name0 as 'User'

from v_R_User

where user_account_control0 = '514' or

user_account_control0 = '66050'

order by Full_User_Name0

Update:

Matt Broadstock pointed out a much more elegant solution for this same issue. Here's his SQL:

SELECT TOP 100000 * from v_R_User SYS

WHERE ((POWER(2,1)) & SYS.User_Account_Control0) <> 0

ORDER BY SYS.User_Account_Control0

HTTP 500 Error at Secondary Site Management Point

jmarcum — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 18:26:00 GMT

Most commonly when I have seen HTTP 500 errors on a management point it’s been a SQL permissions issue. Today I ran across another problem that resulted in HTTP 500 errors when testing a management point on a child secondary site. in an effort to resolve the issue I removed the MP using the console on the central site then I noticed that the change was never reflected at the child primary to which to secondary site reports. I opened the sitectrl.ct0 file at the secondary site and I saw there was a delta change reflecting the removal of the MP however that change was not being sent up to the parent site for some reason. To test I made a copy of the sitectrl.ct0, renamed it to sitectrl.ct2 and copied it to the parent sites hman box. The hman.log showed that the site control file serial number was wrong and the file was rejected.

Editing the site control file manually is very unsupported. This is where you should really call CSS.

Of course I figured it was broken already so I may as well take a chance on it before calling support. I took note of the expected serial number version in the HMAN.log at the primary site. I then stopped the sms executive and site component manager services at the secondary site. Open the site control file in notepad, changed the serial number to the number expected by the primary site and saved the file. Next copy the file and rename the extension to ct2. Copy the renamed file to the hman inbox at the primary site and watch the hman.log. You should see the file process successfully this time.

Wait a few minutes then reinstall the management point from the console at the central site. After you see it’s been installed successfully by viewing the mpsetup.log test again using MPList and MPCert.

How to Inventory IE Cache Size Limit

jmarcum — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:19:00 GMT

I was recently asked to report on how large the max size of temporary internet files is for all of our users. We all know SCCM doesn't work well with anything that concerns HKCU settings. Using a post from Sherry Kissinger as a guide I came up with a script that would copy HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\Cache\Content into a custom registry key under HKLM. I then created an advertisement that's set run only when a user is logged on and to run once for each logged in user. Then using regkeytomof I built custom mof edits for SMS_Def and Configuration.mof to collect all the info. Attached is a zip file that contains the mof edits, the script and a sample SQL query that can be used to report on the collected data.

How to Replace Secondary Site Server Hardware

jmarcum — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:00:00 GMT

A common question in forums is how to replace the hardware for secondary site servers. I documented the procedure for our internal use and I decided that the documentation may be useful for others so I am posting it here with a couple words of caution. Some of the steps in my document directly edit the SCCM database. This is totally unsupported, do it at your own risk. If you do it incorrectly you could totally break your site so please make sure you understand what you are doing before you do it. if you don't feel comfortable you can just skip that step, it's very likely skipping that won't hurt anything else in this process because some of the steps in this document are overkill and can safely be skipped. My document assumes there's a central site and a child primary site with secondary sites assigned there. Also you will want to make sure you read my other blog post here http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jmarcum/archive/2010/05/19/146968.aspx and use the files attached to that post to ensure you don't have problems with the preloadpkgonsite.exe tool. I use a bat file to remove certain pck files from SMSPKG before I run the preload tool. That's because OSD packages are not supported when using that tool. Attached to this post are a couple script and files I use in the server replacement process. Before we ship the server on-site I copy the following files to it. SCCM is installed once the server arrives onsite.

SCCM installation media
SCCM Prereqs
R2 install media
KB978021 install
SCCM Toolkit 2
No_sms_on_drive.sms
preloadpkgonsite.exe
xcopy_updated_files.bat
write_preload_bat.ps1
Pstools
Webdav
Clean_files.vbs

Starting CMD As Local System - The Easy Way

jmarcum — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:31:00 GMT

If you've used SMS/SCCM for very long at all it's likely that you've run across a situation where you need to manually execute an install as the local system account for testing purposes. You probably went to your favorite search engine and found a couple methods for start cmd as local system. Those methods likely used a scheduled task or a service to kick off cmd. While those processes to work I find them somewhat convoluted and I can't remember the steps required so I have to hunt them down each time I need to perform them. Here's an easier way to get to cmd as local system using PSExec. Just download PSTools and extract them to a location that's in the system path and run PSExec.exe -i -s -d cmd.exe The command window that opens will be running as local system, from there you can execute anything that you want to to mimic what SCCM would do from a package.

If you don't already have PSTools download them from here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx

Packages Will Not Uncompress After Using Preloadpkgonsite.exe

jmarcum — Wed, 19 May 2010 13:15:00 GMT

I recently ran into an issue while replacing the hardware some secondary sites. During our build process the .pck files are copied to the new hardware prior to shipping the server to its permanent location. Once the server is on-site SCCM is installed and the preloadpkgonsite.exe tool is used to preload the .pck files into the database in bulk using the process described by Marcus Oh in his blog. After doing this some of my packages wouldn’t decompress to the new sites. I tried removing the packages from the DP, then resending them but that didn’t help. I could see in distmgr.log “A newer version (15) of package xxx000B6 has already arrived, delete the replication file D:\SCCM\inboxes\distmgr.box\INCOMING\NK81JJDQ.PKG for version 12 .” This was rather puzzling for a couple of reasons, first of all the current version of my package is 16, not 15 nor 12. Secondly not only does the console show that there’s no version of the package installed at this site but just to make sure I ran a delete statement to delete the pkgstatus directly from the database. It seems really strange that this package is not in the database for this site yet when it gets copied down the site thinks the package is already there and deletes the replication files.

Once I was at my wits end I called CSS, got a very knowledgeable guy by the name of Cliff and we worked through the issue quickly. Hopefully by posting the resolution here someone else can also benefit from his expertise without having to place a call to CSS.

With the old preloadpkgonsite.exe tool (or the new one in SCCM Toolkit v2 if you do not specify the /UpdateStoredPkgVersion switch) the stored package version is automatically set to the source package version. These two versions are not always the same and in cases where they differ you will have the problem I am describing here. If you want to see which packages will experience this issue prior to using the preloadpkgonsite.exe tool run this query in SQL Management Studio. You can then prevent the issue by simply specifying the correct values when you run the preloadpkgonsite.exe tool.

Select All

Name,

PkgID,

SourceVersion,

StoredPkgVersion

from

SMSPackages

where

StoredPkgVersion <> SourceVersion

Greg Ramsey came up with a nifty little PowerShell script that will check the database for each storedpkgversion and write out a bat file to run preloadpkgonsite.exe with the correct parameters for each package. Here's a copy of that script. Besure to replace MYSMSPROVIDER with the name of your provider machine and XXX with your site code. Be sure to use the new version of preloadpkgonsite.exe from the SCCM v2 toolkit.

$pkgs = get-wmiobject sms_package -computer MYSMSPROVIDER -namespace root\sms\site_XXX

$pkgs | foreach {

if (test-path @("D:\smspkg\" + $_.PackageID + ".pck"))

{

$output += @("PreloadPkgOnSite.exe " + $_.PackageID + " /UpdateStoredPkgVersion " + $_.StoredPkgVersion)

}

$output | out-file -filepath "D:\SCCM Install\preloadpck.bat" -encoding ascii

If it’s too late for you to add the the /UpdateStoredPkgVersion switch because you’ve already run the preloadpkgonsite.exe tool without the switch like I did and you need to fix this issue keep reading the fix is coming up next

Start by removing from the child site server any files that contain the package ID that’s not working. This includes the compressed files from SMSPKG, the uncompressed files from SMSPKGx$ and the .ICO, .PKG and .NAL files from inboxes\pkginfo.box and lastly the .PKG file from inboxes\distmgr.box

Next run the following in SQL Management studio on the central site server as well as, if applicable, the broken sites direct parent primary site. Be sure to replace the below entries in < > with the appropriate Package ID and Server Name

Select * from PkgStatus where ID = '<PackageID>' and PkgServer = '<ServerName>'

This first entry should return the package for the server and its status and sourceversion.

Status of 0 and SourceVersion of X where X is your current package version, would be a normal working package.

Anything other than status 0 or 2 indicates the package is in process, and may need to be manually updated with the Update PkgStaus query below:

It is also possible, that the status could be correct, and that the version is correct, but that the target server will not extract the latest version due to some failure in the past.

Here are the possible status codes and their meaning:

PKG_STATUS_NONE 0

PKG_STATUS_SENT 1

PKG_STATUS_RECEIVED 2

PKG_STATUS_INSTALLED 3

PKG_STATUS_RETRY 4

PKG_STATUS_FAILED 5

PKG_STATUS_REMOVED 6

PKG_STATUS_PENDING_REMOVE 7 // Not used.

PKG_STATUS_REMOVE_FAILED 8

PKG_STATUS_RETRY_REMOVE 9

Please note the disclaimer… Directly editing the SCCM database as we are about to do is totally unsupported and shouldn't be done unless you really know what you are doing and you have a current backup of the SCCM database.

Now that you read my disclaimer above, (You did read it did you?) you need to set the SourceVersion to 0 and the status set to 2 which will force a new copy down to the Site/DP, if more than one DP is at the Site in question, then you will have to use the PkgServer instead of SiteCode.

So run this in SQL Management Studio.

Update PkgStatus

Set Status = '2', SourceVersion = '0'

Where ID = '<PackageID>' and PkgServer = '<ServerName>'

Once you update the package with status of 2 and source version of 0, then run the Manage Distribution Points Wizard in the ConfigMgr Console, and choose to refresh the package on the affected server. This should allow the package to be updated correctly.

Pin "New Office Document" to Windows 7 Start Menu

jmarcum — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:58:00 GMT

If you are like me and you became dependant upon the New Office Document and Open Office Document icons on the start menu in Office 2000 and previous versions of Office running on Windows XP or previous versions of Windows here's a tip for you.

You probably already know that in Office 2003 and up these icons are not installed by default but you can add them by doing a custom installation of Office. You probably also know that setting the start menu to classic in Vista puts these icons back where we like them.

Now comes Windows 7 which has no classic start menu. We can pin items to the start menu in Windows 7 and we can install these icons using a custom office install but for whatever reason these two icons will not pin to the start menu.

Now for the fix.... Create two shortcuts pointing to osa.exe in your <Microsoft Office\Office12> folder, with parameter -n for "New Office Document" and -f for "Open Office document". You can now pin these custom created icons to the start menu. Next if you want the icons to look like the correct icons just select them by going to properties on your new shortcuts, the icons are in osa.exe.

More info can be found here. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290144

Note: This procedure does not work for Office 2010. osa.exe was removed from Office 2010.

How-To Install or Update KMS on Server 2008 for Windows 7 and Server 2008 Support

jmarcum — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:14:00 GMT

Before you can add KMS for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 to your Server 2008 machine you first need to make sure the server is at least SP2 then install the hotfix KB968912.

Once your server is updated and you are ready to install KMS on your Windows Server 2008 box simply run slmgr /ipk xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx but of course replace the X's with your Windows Server R2 KMS key. Notice that I said R2 there? Yes that's correct use your R2 KMS key even if the server you are installing KMS on is not an R2 server. If you do not use the R2 key your Windows 7 clients will not activate against this KMS server. After you run the /ipk command run slmgr /ato to activate the KMS server. If this is your first KMS server it's a good idea to go out to DNS and ensure that it registers in DNS and that there are no other rogue KMS servers listed in DNS. You can find these by opening the forward lookup zones and look for _VLMCS records.

If you already have a KMS server inplace and you simply want to update it for Windows 7 you simply need to run the slmgr /upk to uninstall the old product key then run slmgr /ipk xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx to replace the product key with your R2 key. Once that is done run slmgr /ato to register the KMS server then restart the KMS server service.

SCCM Or WAIK Hangs During Install on Server 2008

jmarcum — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:09:00 GMT

If you are trying to install SCCM on Server 2008 SP1 and the SCCM install hangs take a look at the installation log. Most likely the last thing that you will see in the log is that the WAIK is being installed. Cancel the SCCM install and try to install the WAIK from downloaded iso media. If it hangs or you are presented with an error "installation failed" upgrade your Server 2008 SP1 to SP2 and try again. This worked for me ;-)

Cannot find path for destination inbox Asset Intelligence KB Manager on server REGISTRY

jmarcum — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:17:00 GMT

If you see the error "Cannot find path for destination inbox Asset Intelligence KB Manager on server REGISTRY" on a secondary site server in the mpfdm.log you are missing some registry kes that point to this inbox. This is a known issue and you need to manually create a couple registry keys and the directories that are missing. The easiest way to know exactly what to ccreate is to look at a server that does not have the error and essentially copy the keys from it. You can't do export and import though because the keys are server specific. The will be located in two places First of all create a new string value under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\SMS\MPFDM\Inboes. Name this key "Asset Intelligence KB Manager" and for the value enter the path to that directory for example C:\SMS\inboxes\amtproxymgr.box. Next you will need to create a key under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\SMS\Inbox Source\Inbox Definitions\ look for the key with the largest numeric value here and name your new key the next largest numeric value.

I advise that anyone following these instructions backup the registry first and also test this in a lab if at all possible!

Enter the information in the key as follows:

new string value "Inbox Name" with value of "Asset Intelligence KB Manager"

new string value "Relative Path" with value of "inboxes\AIKbMgr.box"

new string value of "NAL Path" with no value entered

new DWord value User Rights hex = 0

new DWord value Service Rights hex = 4

new DWord value Monitoring Enabled hex = 1

new DWord value Location Type hex = 1

new DWord value Guest Rights hex = 1

Find the IP Address of all Clients Whose Patch Status is Unknown

jmarcum — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:09:00 GMT

If you are seeing a group of clients whose patch status is unknown it would be helpful to know if they are all in the same subnet. If many of them are in the same subnet there's a good chance that a firewall is blocking their access to the WSUS server. Here's a SQL Query that should return the IP address of all computers with unknown patch status.

SELECT DISTINCT dbo.v_R_System.Name0, dbo.v_GS_NETWORK_ADAPTER_CONFIGUR.IPAddress0

FROM dbo.v_R_System
INNER JOIN dbo.v_GS_NETWORK_ADAPTER_CONFIGUR ON dbo.v_R_System.ResourceID = dbo.v_GS_NETWORK_ADAPTER_CONFIGUR.ResourceID
WHERE dbo.v_UpdateComplianceStatus_Unknown.ResourceID in
(select resourceid from dbo.v_UpdateComplianceStatus_Unknown) and (NOT (dbo.v_GS_NETWORK_ADAPTER_CONFIGUR.IPAddress0 = 'null'))
and dbo.v_GS_NETWORK_ADAPTER_CONFIGUR.IPAddress0 not like '0.0.0.0'
order by IPAddress0