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UPDATE: found a problem in the "retrieve ads and updates from sccm" script that was causing the script to stop working under certain conditions.  I've modified it slightly and posted it at the bottom of the blog post.   WARNING: this is a proof of concept.  don't just load this in your production environment and kick it off.  you'll be totally on your own (as if that weren't the case already).  while it works in my test environment, it may not in yours.  test, test, test.   I've been spending some time toying around with opalis.  the first hurdle, if you've been reading my posts, was in setting up the thing.  the second hurdle was actually getting something useful to work, and the third hurdle was to figure out how to export something for use by communities.  fortunately, I've cleared them all.  the particular proof of concept I wanted to try was using opalis to integrate scom with sccm. whenever we go through patching cycles, we tend to spend

i was watching russinovich’s presentation called “the case of the unexplained 2010” when something he mentioned caught my attention: wmiprvse.  if you watch the segment from 21:00 to 32:00, you’ll get some good insight on troubleshooting with process explorer.  fun stuff… you can watch the video here and get process explorer here .

  yes, virtual pc has dhcp built-in.  found this out in a training class where virtual pc was being used to host virtual machines in an osd (operating system deployment) scenario.  one of the best things you can do with imaging pcs is pxe boot.  this kind of falls apart when you have competing dhcp services. on statically assigned IPs, you’d never realize that anything was going on.  however, in an osd training scenario, you usually have a machine that will get an ip address, connect to pxe (wds), and retrieve a boot image.  we fully expected the pxe client to receive the ip address from dhcp that was loaded on the domain controller.  instead, we kept getting an apipa address (automatic private ip addressing – 169.254.0.0 – 169.254.255.255).  you would generally expect to see this on a windows 98 and above machine where a machine can’t get an ip address and assigns one to itself. because of that behavior, it seemed as if the pxe boot machine couldn’t get an ip address from the dh

i’ve been saying on twitter that i was going to rebuild my opalis environment.  i did – and i did it just to capture some good notes.  the previous environment was kind of built with spit, glue, prayer, hope, and duct tape.  before i turn anything over for implementation, i like to make sure things are pretty sound.  anyway, i never could get the operator console to work before.  after i saw mark gosson’s demo again, i was determined to figure out why.  the answer was so stupid i wanted to smack myself.  oh well.  at least there are some good items that may help someone else.   use the OPCONSOLEINSTALLER command-line wizard (or script, if you prefer) the first thing you should be aware of is that there’s an installer for the operator console.  to get this to work right, this is what you’ll have to do. create a folder for your console.  make it simple.  mine was c:\opalis\jboss. copy the contents of jboss-4.2.3.GA to this folder.  your directory contents should look like