SCCM Client looking at old Secondary Site

Recently I removed a secondary site from SCCM and created a DP for that site under a different Secondary site.  Clients all of a sudden stopped talking with SCCM.  I found out that in System Management in ADSI, the old Secondary Site was still listed.

After removing the old Secondary site from ADSI, and forcing a machine policy refresh on the clients, they were then able to get software installations.

Installing SCCM R2 Hotfix KB977384

I was having issues installing the SCCM 2007 R2 Hotfix KB977384 so I could upgrade to SCCM 2007 R3.

The installation would fail stating it ended prematurely.  After right-clicking on the .MSI and selecting Install from the context menu the hotfix installed without issue.

Microsoft Hyper-V and Wireshark

After looking all over I kept finding that a Hyper-V guest could not run Wireshark or any network monitoring tool because the Hyper-V switch could not be put into promiscuous mode.  Here is what I found:

On a brand new tower server, HP Proliant ML350 G6 with a Broadcom NIC, I can use a Hyper-V guest with Wireshark installed and have no issues picking up traffic from the whole network.

On a rack mount server, HP Proliant DL380 G7 with a HP NC382i DP Multifunction Gigabit Server adapter, has issues with Wireshark and Hyper-V.  It will only pick up the broadcast traffic as well as the traffic destined to that device.

I also had an HP NC375T PCI Express Quad Port Gigabit Server Adapter that I tried in both servers.  The ML350 worked fine with the adapter, but the DL380 still had issues.

Everything I have researched online tells me that because the Hyper-V network manager acts like a switch (which I understand) it will not pass through any traffic other than Broadcast and traffic that goes to the server.  What I don’t understand, if this is true, is why the ML350 with the Broadcom NIC and HP PCI NIC work.

I can only believe that it has to do with the motherboard.

Large SCCM Reports giving HTTP 500 Error

If your SCCM infrastructure and clients are in the thousands, this fix might come in handy for you.  When looking at some reports there can be thousands of lines of output and the default ASP Buffering Limit is set too low.  To fix this we need to increase the limit.

1. Launch IIS Manager

2. Select the server that you want to make this change to.

1. Note: If you don’t want this change to affect all sites on the server, select the Default Web Site

3. Double-click on ASP.

4. Make sure “Enable Buffering” is set to True.

5. Under Limit properties the default value is 4Mb or 4194304 bytes. I expanded this to 6Mb or 6291456 bytes and it fixed the issue.

6. Click on Apply in the Right pane.

7. Open up server manager, expand the roles and select “Web Server (IIS)”

8. On the right side select “Restart” to restart the IIS services.

Install the SCCM Client via Command Line

The following command line will install the SCCM client.

\\<SCCMSERVER>\<CCMSETUPSHARE>\ccmsetup.exe /MP:<SCCMSERVER.FQDN> SMSSITECODE=ABC FSP=<SCCMSERVER.FQDN> SLP=<SCCMSERVER.FQDN> SMSCACHE=<LOCATION OF LOCAL CACHE>

Expand HP Write Filter Past Maximum

The HP Write Filter only allows for up to 64Mb.  By modifying the registry administrators can set the write filter to any size they would like.  Make sure not to exceed the amount of memory on the client.  The value will want to be changed to decimal and is noted in bytes.  My example shows how to expand the write filter to 115Mb (115*1024*1024 = 120586240).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ControlSet001\Services\Ramdrive\Parameter.
Set to decimal value of 120586240

Setup HP Thin Clients with SCCM 2007 using XPembedded

The following will show you how to setup a T5720 thin client to work with SCCM as well as using the captured data image.  This process can be used with the T5730 series as well.  Josh and I have worked on this for a few months now and we finally figured out the right combination of VBScripts and cleaning of the hard drive to get this all to work how we wanted for our corporate environment.

Visit Josh’s blog: http://joshuasmueller.wordpress.com/

NOTE:  I do not support any of the scripts, but give a base of what I have implemented.  Any changes are done at your own risk.

Some of these customizations can be changed based on your environment, I have made this post as a reminder for myself as to what I all did to get these thin clients running.

Comments, Questions, and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Windows – Defragmenting the Hard Drive

So some of us have the issue where we transfer tons of files between different computers.  As time passes this amount of file transfer added with software installations and removals can quickly make a fast system appear somewhat slower.  Many people might say that a fragmented hard drive will not cause much slowness, but in computer speed even milliseconds are a lot.

Here are a few of the different options you can use with Windows:

• Manually running the disk defrag program.
• Creating a command line batch file to run the defrag.
• Using 3rd party applications to run the defrag.
• Creating a VBScript to run the defrag command.

Windows XPe – EWFDLL.DLL & Imaging

What does this code do?
The following code will reconfigure the Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) on thin client devices after they have been cloned.

Why do we need it?
After cloning a thin client device, the EWF will state that it cannot get the correct configuration.  This also means you cannot enable/disable/commit any changes to the device.  If you try to make changes to the device before reconfiguring EWF, the changes will be lost after the next reboot.  Once you run the command you will need to reboot and then the EWF will be in an enabled mode.

Write a basic HTA

Originally created by a coworker: http://joshuasmueller.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/write-a-basic-hta/.

What does this do?

The code below will create a basic HTA that has a link to open Notepad.