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Showing posts from October, 2007

sms: installing itmu updates out-of-band

i was on a field visit recently and came across an interesting dilemma.  the administrators i worked with indicated that the turnaround time on a newly imaged machine would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 48 hours.  this was something that i couldn't get my mind to engage.  if the image process itself took an hour or so, throw in a few minutes to unpack it, set it up, connect it, pop the disc in and run it, etc... why was it taking 48 hours or longer? well, it seemed that our antiquated imaging process caused delays of up to 48 hours before a newly imaged machine would receive all the required security updates. rather than using something like going to windows update, the administrators chose to let the process work through on its own.  looking into this, our problems were created by a couple of things that could easily be addressed. sms client installation script is only available as a machine startup gpo. this requires the machine to be rebooted twice. it had to receive t

os: windows system state analyzer

this has actually been released for a little while. i don't know why i'm just getting around to posting it when i've known about it awhile. i generally post the things that i want to locate later... and i guess this hadn't bubbled to the top of that list yet. anyway, i was looking for it... so here it is for your information too. basically it'll show you before and after state changes. you run it before you make a change (like an installation) and then after. http://microsoft.mrmpslc.com/InnovateOnWindowsServer/resources.aspx