Matt Broadstock at myITforum

Moving my articles to The Blogcast Repository

mbroadstock — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 21:26:00 GMT

I plan to move my articles over to my new blog on Brian Tucker's new website before too long. I will update all of the articles on myITforum.com so they have a link to the new article once I get everything moved over. I will probably still do some blogging in both places for a while but I want to make sure I only have one place where I have to maintain my technical articles. I am also starting work on revamping www.smsutils.com and I will probably move the articles there once I have the new site up and running. After seeing Brian's new site, I'm a bit inspired to get my site looking/working better. And running off of a server that isn't in someone's basement. :) I'm not sure that CS will be a good platform for what I need so I am going to start out by upgrading from DNN 2.1.2 to DNN 4.0.2 and see how that goes.

I have a ton of SMS-related scripts that I haven't gotten around to posting anywhere yet. Once I get our website updated I plan to make them available to the world. I think people will find them very useful.

Loaded up IE7 Beta2

mbroadstock — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 21:17:00 GMT

I really like it but I'm having problems doing anything but adding new posts on my blog now. As soon as I go to the admin page it just sends me straight to the “Posts" page. Maybe closing the browser and re-loading the page will help... We shall see.

I never thought I'd get away from FireFox for home use but, from what I've seen so far, IE7 is going to be awesome.

New Google toolbar released

mbroadstock — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 17:19:00 GMT

I haven't loaded the new toolbar up yet but I'll be sure to do so today. It doesn't look like there is a Firefox version out yet though...

The Google page itself has a list/description of the new features but this article has a good breakdown as well.

Apparently they also released a version of the toolbar targetted to the enterprise environment (manageable via GPOs, etc). I'm not exactly sure how this would be utilized....

New Honda with autopilot

mbroadstock — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 17:03:00 GMT

When they can get it all worked out so I can take a nice nap while travelling cross-country, I'll have to get myself something like this.

WMF patch

mbroadstock — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 22:32:00 GMT

Just saw Tim's post on the Jan 10th patch. My current client (like a lot of companies I am sure) had a conference call with our TAM today and found out about the Jan 10th timeframe earlier today. They also recommended against installing the 3rd-party patch because they don't know what it does. I'm not totally sure I agree with that. I trust the IST guys and they say it only does what it says it does. But the plan, for now, is to hold off on anything and see what happens. We've got a package ready in SMS that will unregister the DLL so we can send it out if things start going bad. The only thing that makes me feel the least bit comfortable is that our pattern files are pretty up-to-date. Every exploit I've read about so far just uses the WMF to install a known virus/trojan. And as long as the pattern files find those, it *should* be ok. (fingers-crossed).

Good documents on managing Vista

mbroadstock — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 00:52:00 GMT

I like what they are doing with ADM files (now ADMx files). Finally XML-based. And they are no longer storing separate copies of each ADM in each GPO. And I know Tim will be happy that they included the ability to restrict device installation via GPO. Figuring out how to properly lock down USB-drive access in XP was a real pain (and still not 100% successful).

I'm still curious if they have abandoned the old IEAK method of managing IE settings that Group Policy currently uses. Surely they finally got things figured out and are using true group policies for managing those IE settings instead of that funky, buggy, piece of garbage GPO DLL extension.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=311f4be8-9983-4ab0-9685-f1bfec1e7d62&DisplayLang=en

Also, I don't always like Paul Thurrott's take on things but he did a pretty good writeup on the latest build of Vista.

Blog comments/feedback still don't work?

mbroadstock — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 20:41:00 GMT

Guess I was thinking moving servers and changing domain names would be the end-all-be-all fix. :) I forget what the deal was, can you use Firefox to post comments but not IE? Wasn't there a different issue with Firefox and the blogs though? Like you can't sign in to admin your blog...??

Anyway, I was just going to post a comment to Andrew's SMS DP issues so I guess I'll just post it in my blog.

No guarantees that this is what you are running into but you might look this over...

http://myitforum.com/blog/mbroadstock/articles/16231.aspx

No support for clusters with the new R2 DFS replication

mbroadstock — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 22:18:00 GMT

I was really hoping that the new FRS replacement in R2 would work to keep clusters in sync with each other. Apparently not. It does look like a huge improvement over the current FRS but it would have helped me out with a current disaster recovery project if they would have made it smart enough to work with clusters.

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/Library/b21366bd-d2a1-4bfb-b6f9-55dd5106b31d1033.mspx

On server clusters, replicated folders must be located in the local storage of a node because the DFS Replication service is not designed to work in a coordinated way with cluster components, and the service will not fail over to another node.

There's a decent video on some of the features of the new DFS Replication that comes with R2. One of the cool things they touch on is that the differential copies (only copying differences in files) will work for “new” files in some cases. For instance, if someone does a SaveAs on an existing file, DFSR is smart enough to recognize that and use the original file as a base and only copy the differences between the new file and the one that is already on the other link target replicas. Although I suppose I shouldn't call it a link target anymore since they've changed all of the terminology on us.

Restart Manager in Vista

mbroadstock — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 22:48:00 GMT

I'm hoping they manage to get this new feature in place when they release Vista. It would be really nice to be able to install patches (or whatever other software) overnight and have the user come back to their desktop with all of their applications in the state that they were in when they left it--even if the system reboots.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1895276,00.asp

Using Community server for corporate knowledge sharing

mbroadstock — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 19:59:00 GMT

We're experimenting with using Community Server for internal knowledge sharing at my current client (for IT folks only). We have a Sharepoint site setup that we use for posting tips/tricks and all that good stuff. But a lot of the knowledge sharing that goes on is via e-mail. And, e-mail gets purged periodically and requires that everyone keeps a copy of it if they think it is something worth keeping. We're playing around with using forums to toss ideas back and forth and provide solutions for each other. I'm optimistic that it will be a big success--just need to get enough people to buy in to it so it is a useful tool. We've always wanted to put out a newsletter periodically from the corporate IT staff to the remote folks. I think we can utilize a blog for that. I just wish I was the one who thought of using CS like this!

I've been at companies where we tried to use Exchange public folders for similar things but it never went over very well. CS seems like it could be an extremely useful tool for this type of thing. So easy to use...

Finding SMS Packages without a specific sharename defined on DPs

mbroadstock — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:50:00 GMT

I hate it when I am troubleshooting software distribution issues and the package is configured to deploy to the distribution points in the SMSPKG folder with a subfolder named after the Package ID. It seems to be a lot easier to figure things out if the package is configured to create a named folder on the SMSDist share. I put together a quick script to identify those packages so they can be updated. Just update the SMS server and site name...

On Error Resume Next
Dim strComputer, objWMIService, propValue, SWBemlocator, UserName, Password, colItems

strComputer = "smsserver"
UserName = ""
Password = ""
Set SWBemlocator = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator")
Set objWMIService = SWBemlocator.ConnectServer(strComputer,"\root\sms\site_XXX",UserName,Password)
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from SMS_Package where ShareType='1' and PkgSourceFlag<>'1'",,48)
'ShareType = 1 means it doesn't have a specific sharename (will use SMSPKG folder)
'PkgSourceFlag = 1 means it doesn't have source files-need to exclude these

For Each objItem in colItems
WScript.Echo objItem.PackageID & vbTab & objItem.Name
Next

SMS Alliance?

mbroadstock — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 15:45:00 GMT

What do I have to do to get into the SMS Alliance?? :) Poor little SMSUtils getting left out??

Google throwing down the gauntlet to Microsoft

mbroadstock — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 16:24:00 GMT

Google is hiring programmers to work on improving OpenOffice. As if Microsoft doesn't already hate Google....going after one of their bread 'n butter products will certainly have Ballmer pissed off again...

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-1851613,00.html

Improvements to SMS Group/Collection creation HTA

mbroadstock — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 18:09:00 GMT

I posted a while back about a little HTA that I was working on to help automate the creation of groups in AD and the creation of Collections that are tied to those groups. I've added a few options to make it a bit more flexible.

Collection to Limit To
Parent Collection
OU to create the groups in
Group Description
Group Notes

Here's a screenshot.

I'm not ready to post all of the code quite yet but if anyone wants to try it out, shoot me an e-mail (matt.broadstock@gmail.com) and I'll give you the code and explain what changes you will need to make to get it to work in your environment. There are a few variables that have to be updated in the code and you'll need to create a small XML file that has information on your OU structure and SMS Collection structure.

I'm not sure how many people are using AD groups to manage collection membership but it works great at my current client. Each department is able to manage their own groups in AD (therefore they can manage their collection members). But pretty much everything is SMS is managed centrally. Because we have separate collections (and groups) for each department, creating everything for each new package/advertisement is time consuming. At least it used to be. :)

More DHCP corruption issues

mbroadstock — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 19:10:00 GMT

We've now had 6 issues with DHCP corruption in the past month or so. It has been on a different server each time and some of them are on SP1 and some of them are not. I'm not sure what the heck is going on but I'm certainly glad I wrote a good DHCP backup/recovery process. I just didn't think I'd have to use it so much. I'm curious if one of the patches that was recently installed is causing the problems. It's a bit strange to go so long without any issues and then have 6 distinct major issues in less than a month. We lose a bunch of reservations each time and some of the scope/server options get blown away randomly. I've reviewed the DHCP logs and don't see anything especially strange. It only happens when the server gets rebooted. I'm not sure if just stopping/re-starting the DHCP service will be enough to cause the issue or not. I'm planning to try that on one of the servers that hasn't been rebooted since these problems started popping up.

I'm just hoping this is a one-time issue for each server. The fix only takes a couple of minutes (gotta love NETSH) but it is still a bit annoying..