giving something back after taking a lot :-)

Maik Koster at myITforum.com

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IP Range Boundary format stored in Active Directory changed with SCCM 2007 SP2

December 16, 2009

OK, this is probably one of these articles that only a few people are interested in, but hey why not. The Internet is a mish-mash of information, so let’s add another piece to it ;-) As some of you might know, the Deployment webservice is able to identify the SCCM site code and assigned site code for a computer by querying Active Directory which is actually a nice feature as this is easier to query than the SCCM SLP. Anyway since SP2 there has been (at least) one change in the way SCCM is storing...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: ,

Finding computer in Active Directory based on the netbootGuid

December 15, 2009

A couple weeks ago I got a question from a norwegian fellow. They prestage all computers in Active Directory based on their UUID and he wanted to be able to query AD to get the computer name for their Deployments. The UUID of a computer can be stored in the Active Directory property netbootGuid . This property is e.g. also used by the RIS Deployment process. During a RIS Deployment it would be able to find an already existing computer object based on this property or create a new computer account...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: ,

Making custom Database and Webservice scripts work again in MDT 2010

August 28, 2009

In MDT 2010 there has been some changes in the scripts. One of these changes was to extract the Classes regarding Data Access (Database, Webservice) into a separate script called "ZITDataAccess.vbs". If you created your own custom scripts which made use of one of these classes you need to update them to reflect this change. I will show the necessary changes by way of changing my scripts used in " Moving computer in Active Directory using a webservice ". As the MDT Team just moved...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: , , ,

Get SMS/SCCM Information from Active Directory

March 15, 2009

During Deployments (also in other situations but this Blog is more about Deployments) you sometimes need to gather some information about the existing SMS/SCCM Infrastructure. Mainly things like the SiteCode for a specific computer or even more important the assignedSiteCode (From the assigned Primary Site) and the siteServers responsible for these sites. How do we get this information? The easiest way is probably hardcoding this information somewhere. We could store it in the cs.ini if using MDT...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: ,

Moving computers in Active Directory using a webservice

March 15, 2009

If you are using GPOs in your Active Directory Environment you can come into a situation during your deployments, where the settings of a GPO might have impacts on the deployment process. To avoid this and be able to have full control on what happens during the deployment, one way to solve this problem is to have a specific OU which blocks all GPOs. I refer to this as staging OU. But this raises two other problems. When we add a new computer it's quite easy to have it added to a specific OU....  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: , ,

A Webservice for OSD and MDT Deployments

February 11, 2009

In the first posts I showed how you can create ( Create your own MDT Webservice - Part 1 , Create your own MDT Webservice - Part 2 ) and access ( Calling a webservice from a script using MDT 2008 ) a simple webservice to be used in Deployments to ease access to the MDT Database. In the last post you could find a complete set of stored procedures do manipulate the MDT Database on-the-fly ( Get access to the MDT Database ). Now we are going to combine this. For the ones just interested to download...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: , , , , ,

Get Active Directory Site for IP Address

January 19, 2009

During the preparation of the SMS/SCCM Webservice for MDT/OSD Deployments I came across a problem to get the Active Directory Site for a given IP Address. There were a couple of examples available on the Internet but most of them just called the DsGetDcName API. As this is possible within the .Net Framework I personally try to avoid using a com API if using .Net. Actually the .Net Framework 2.0 contains a namespace called "System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory". So I thought it must...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: