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Showing posts from February, 2008

misc: an additional method to resolving wmi failures...

it's understated to say that issues with wmi are nebulous problems.  i've blogged about it a couple of times in the past, each with a potentially different solution.  there are even pretty in depth posts with how to correct wmi problems.  here's some links for starters: http://marcusoh.blogspot.com/2006/03/sms-addressing-wmi-corruption.html http://marcusoh.blogspot.com/2008/01/mom-correcting-most-troublesome-mom.html http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/help/wmi.mspx they contain some of the more common ways of troubleshooting wmi problems.  there's going to come a time when none of it works.  you'll be tempted to rebuild the entire repository just to beat down the recalcitrant system.  before doing so, try this method that one of my coworkers used to correct a problem issued when issuing this query: select * from win32_networkadapter this would kick back error # 0x80041013 - "provider load failure". 

misc: dsquery vs powershell (2)

this time, i'm going to show you how to retrieve the group membership of a user.  so to begin with, in cmd shell with dsquery: dsquery user -samid username | dsget user -memberof and in powershell: ( Get -QADUser -samaccountname username).memberof look at that, the powershell command-line is in fact, just a tiny bit shorter.  if you run them both, though, dsquery does outperform powershell by a large margin in this demonstration.  still, you have to learn this stuff sooner or later.  :) now, if you run it as two separate commands, powershell performs just as fast as dsquery (to the human eye at least).  like this: $ user = get -qaduser -samaccountname username $ user .memberof

mom: empty values from performance threshold rules...

after an upgrade of our mom servers and agents, we noticed that any of our performance threshold rules were bringing back empty values in the "description:" field.  as you'll notice from the snippet below, the information does exist.  for example, source contains "smtp server" and "remote queue length", both of which should be filled in for the description. Description: : : value =    Name: SMTP: Remote Queue > 250 Severity: Error Source: SMTP Server: Remote Queue Length: _Total if you're running into this problem, it most likely stems from a deployment of hotfix kb934441 .  kb934441 upgrades the momengine.dll component to 5.0.2911.41 which is the source of the issue.  there's an unpublished hotfix for this known issue that corrects this problem.  you'll know you're running it if your ve

sms: maybe you should date your clients? :^)

i don't think it's too much of a stretch or really a broad assumption that any given collection at probably any given site has some amount of stale information.  machines go offline, people go on vacation, machines "mysteriously" drop off the domain... this tends to come up often so i thought i'd put it out there.  it's all over the place though.  do a search for "sms datediff", "sms getdate", or "sms dateadd".  my guess is the first one will be the most beneficial since it's the one most people use.  if you find that you have too many old machines showing up in your collections, try something like this: select SMS_R_System.ResourceID from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_WORKSTATION_STATUS on SMS_G_System_WORKSTATION_STATUS.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where DATEDIFF(dd,SMS_G_System_WORKSTATION_STATUS.LastHardwareScan,GetDate()) < 14 datediff looks for these parts: what t