June 2008 - Posts
Having a collection based on Active Directory User Group membership has been a holy grail since we installed SMS. It seemed to make sense to everyone that since we have the user ID of the last logged in user and can pull user ID's from AD groups we should be able to marry the two into a collection of computers.
Not so much.
After investing significant time under SMS 2k3 SP2, I gave up. There are a couple of Third-Party add ons that can accomplish the task, but we weren't buying.
Today I saw the same question again in a MyItForum post, and decided to re-visit the problem now that we had SMS 2k3 SP3 and Asset Intelligence deployed. Here's the resulting query:
select distinct SMS_R_System.Name from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_SYSTEM_CONSOLE_USAGE on SMS_G_System_SYSTEM_CONSOLE_USAGE.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_G_System_SYSTEM_CONSOLE_USAGE.TopConsoleUser in (select distinct UniqueUserName from SMS_R_User where UserGroupName = "<domain>\\<group>")
Just replace "<domain>\\<group>" with your site specific info and you should be good to go. Notice that we user TopConsoleUser here, which hopefully more accurately reflects the user of the computer than just "last logged on".
... and it rocks. Some quick initial testing shows that this tool finally has real value on a Windows system.
What's New since Network Monitor 3.1
Process Tracking: View all the processes on your machine generating network traffic (process name and PID). Use the conversation tree to view frames associated with each process.
Find conversations: Quickly isolate frames in the same network conversation. Isolate TCP streams, HTTP flows etc.
PCAP capture file support*
Capture engine re-architecture to improve capture rate in high-speed networks. NM 3.2 drops significantly fewer frames that NM 3.1
· Extensive parser set: Parsers for over 300 protocols! Parsers for the protocols covered by the Windows Open Protocol Specifications (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc216517.aspx).
· NM API: Create your own applications that capture, parser and analyze network traffic!
Better parser management: By default only a subset of parsers are loaded. You can load the full parser set by changing the parser search order in Tools>Options>Parser
Support for frame truncation. Go to Tools>Options and limit the number of bytes captured per frame to improve performance.
More extensive documentation of the NPL which includes documentation on the new NMAPI. Access the documentation from Help > NPL and API Documentation
Enhanced filtering on items within NPL while loops or arrays. You can specify an index into the array or while loop to filter on
IA64 version now available.
ContainsBin Plug-in: Search frames for arbitrary byte sequences or strings. For example, ContainsBin(FrameData, ASCII, "msn").
More UI indications of conversation status, dropped frames and the number of frames in the capture buffer.
One of the most compelling technologies to come down the pipe from Microsoft is Application Virtualization, formerly known as SoftGrid.
One of the main holdbacks for us and the product was that applications that needed to interact had to be 'bubbled' together. Since most of our major laptops apps interact with each other and Office and Adobe, this posed a big problem. Who wants to roll all of that into one bubble?
Well, word came down in a meeting I was at on Monday with the fine folks at Microsoft that in the next version of App Virtualization you will be able to create a seperate 'bubble' for each app, and that these 'bubbles' will interact with each other.
To which I said : "Cool."
This is a big win for them. It lifts a large barrier to adoption of this product. I've been trying to find time to lab this up, but not having much luck so far. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I can re-enable my SCCM / SCOM labs for further study and play time.
After much delay, uncertainty, fear and paranoia, I've finally moved our Ops Manager 2007 (SP1) DB to a new 64-bit HP behemoth server.
I can say that it went exactly as advertised. I chose not to delete the original DB, but merely backed it up and than took it offline. Once I'm sure things are happy, healthy and stable I'll delete it. Paranoia can be a pain, but I'll take it in cases like this.
The only surprise was the length of time it took to restore the DB. After copying it over I assumed that restoration would be far faster than the backup from the original server, but if anything it took longer to restore the DB to the new server. I'm not quite sure why this would be, but intend to discuss it with our SQL guru when I get the chance.