SMS 2003 going extended support is not a real surprise.  It’s replacement, Microsoft SCCM 2007, has been out in the market place since November 2007.

It isn’t that big a problem for the IT Shop I work in.  Our SMS 2003 infrastructure is mature, and we’re running stable client operating systems.

And as I wrote in “Lonely little SMS 2003 PCK files”, SCCM is on the (distant) horizon, so I have hope.

When I say hope, I mean that Windows 7, which all our customers want, will force the replacement of SMS 2003.

Windows 7 is not compatible with SMS 2003.

Get-ComputersNearMe

Today I learned a little bit about how to get to some of the data stored within special shell folders.  You can get a list of all of the easy-to-get-to special folders here.  I noticed one folder in particular that a bunch of systems administrators I know want to read, and that’s the Nearby Computers page.  Here’s a quick 23-line function that will go and get all of the computers from the Nearby Computers page, ping them, and return the Win32_PingStatus objects.

End-to-End WAN Optimization with BranchCache

Expanding a business into new regions of the world with branch offices is a great idea from a business perspective, but it often presents challenges to network architects and implementers. To connect each branch office to a central location requires some sort of physical or logical connection, with bandwidth that is typically orders of magnitude smaller than local area connections. Low bandwidth combined with the trend toward centralizing organization data often yields branch office links that are congested, resulting in poor performance for applications. Moreover, many types of wide area network (WAN) links are expensive and can incur substantial startup and monthly costs.

Understanding DFSR conflict algorithms (and doing something about conflicts)

I’m frequently asked to explain the DFSR conflict algorithm – i.e. what happens when files are created or modified on two servers before replication takes place. What we don’t document well is that there are actually three conflict algorithms and they all behave quite differently. I am breaking these out into scenarios for easier understanding.

The Configuration Manager Service Pack Install Guide

This document was created to help in troubleshooting Configuration Manager Service Pack 2 (SP2) install failures. This document is not entirely specific to Service Pack 2 and can apply to Service Pack 1 installs, upgrades from SMS 2003 to SCCM, and future service pack or Configuration Manager versions that rely on .mof file compilations, SQL SPNS, provider DLLs, etc.

PowerScripting Podcast with Ed Wilson

Some troubleshooting resouces:
serverfault.com
stackoverflow.com

The call came in:

Noddy22 has less than 5% disk space left.

Our Microsoft SMS 2003 servers are getting a bit tired, and we really don’t want to replace them just now.  There is a SCCM 2007 upgrade project on the horizon.  Or so it’s claimed.

Not many people have seen a Yeti either.

So we make do.  Which means I see if we can remove any software packages from the server (whoopee! I’ve found 10).  Then I thought, what about those compressed package files SMS 2003 creates when it distributes the packages to the servers (including Noddy22)?  .PCK files.

Now you just can’t delete .PCK files, as it breaks package distributions.  I was so grateful that I googled and found Shaun Cassell’s Savings Space on SMS / SCCM servers by deleting PCK files – the pitfalls and fixes article.  Because I was just going to do that very thing.  Dodged a bullet right there.

But, we had more .PCK files on Noddy22 than software packages, what gives?

I suspect that the packages were loaded onto Noddy22 with the SMS 2003 Toolkit 2 utility, Package Loader.  Which created some orphan .PCKs.

My solution?  I compared the .PCK files (240 of them!) to the actual package directories (180!) on the Noddy22server.  And then deleted the 60 orphan .PCK files.

Noddy22 much healthier now.

File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) 1.0

New builds of Microsoft Windows are produced almost every day for internal development and testing. In order to detect performance regressions as soon as possible, those builds have to be evaluated and compared to their predecessors as well as previous public releases. A range of performance tests are used for these comparisons, including one called “FSCT” (which stands for File Server Capacity Tool). FSCT was developed by the Windows Server Performance team as a tool capable of simulating multiple concurrent users accessing a file server using CIFS/SMB/SMB2.

Enable HAL detection on a Windows Server 2008 R2 VHD virtual image
… And I (wrongly) thought we were over the whole HAL detection problem.

SCCM: Forcing a Task Sequence to Rerun

There are well known methods to force an advertisement to rerun – including several add-on tools available for the SMS or SCCM console.  To date, however, there are not equivalent methods to force a task sequence to rerun.  Part of this may be because task sequences are typically thought of as focused on Operating System Deployment (OSD) and rerunning these types of distributions are not as common as rerunning advertisements.

Group Policy Settings References for Windows and Windows Server

These spreadsheets list the policy settings for computer and user configurations included in the Administrative template files delivered with the Windows operating systems specified. You can configure these policy settings when you edit Group Policy objects (GPOs).

The Case of the Mysterious Black Box (SAN analysis for beginners)

I haven’t had any performance analysis challenges lately, but there is a lot of confusion as to how to measure SAN performance. To many, a SAN is a proverbial “mysterious black box” that seems to perplex all who try to measure it’s performance with any measure of certainty. This blog entry covers how I measure the performance of SANs and tries to unlock the mysteries of the black box.

William Stanek: Windows 7: Inside Track, Part 6 “Automating Migrations with USMT 4.0”

William here, continuing with my inside track discussions on Windows 7. Last time, I provided step by step options for using Windows Easy Transfer. Now let’s kick it up a notch and look at automating migrations using User State Migration Tool (USMT) Version 4.0.

How do CMW files in Office 2000-2003 work? How to maintenance MSP files work in Office 2007-2010?

Here is a quick walk through showing the keys that are used to control the CMW and custom MSP files to determine what settings will take effect and if they had been run for the current user or not. … For the purpose of this walkthrough I have created this maintenance MSP. To keep it simple I am going to apply the following two changes in this custom .msp.

Note: this is a work in progress.

This has been a bit of trial and error, but to setup a standalone Active Directory Forest/Domain and SCCM 2007 Primary Server, on the one box, I did the following.

Installed Windows Server 2008 Standard with SP2

Added the following roles

• Active Directory Domain Services
  Run DCPromo
• DNS Server
• Web Server (IIS)
  with the following roles: Application Development (WebDAV), Security/Windows Application Management

Installed the following features

• BITS Server Extensions
• Group Policy Management
• Remote Differential Compression

Extended the AD Schema (.\SMSSetuo\Bin\I386\EXTADSCH.exe)

Installed SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition RTM, with the Reporting Services role.

Updated it to SQL 2008 SP1 Enterprise

Installed SCCM 2007 R2
how can I configure SCCM 2007 SP1 in Windows Server 2008

Install WebDAV

Installed WSUS 3.0 SP1
- the WSUSSetup.log is useful to assist you when WSUS refuses to install.

Further reading:
how can I install SCCM 2007 sp1 in Windows Server 2008 – a step by step guide
Installing and Configuring WebDAV on IIS 7.0