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Showing posts from June, 2009

monitoring group changes with opsmgr

this is relatively simple to do, but i wanted to post it here in case you need to do this yourself.  after you get the alert rule set up, we’ll diverge into using notification channel command to handle the emails.  why?  it’s easier in my case. the first thing we need to do is create an appropriate rule to pick up the events.  there are so many sources of information on how to do this that i’ll just provide a link to them.  here you go: http://tinyurl.com/kv9ddg .  shout out to “stefan the stranger” for showing me that site. here are some things to note. some sources indicate using event description.  if you can get away from doing this, for performance reasons, it’s recommended. parameter 3 holds the group name if you want to do a group name comparison. if you’re searching for multiple events, use a regex statement. if you want to capture the parameter value, you’ll need to push it into a custom field. here’s the statement i’m using for my criteria: ( ( Ev

configmgr console crashes with “the given key was not present in the dictionary"

Image by bdgamer via Flickr one of our site servers seemed to exhibit this puzzling problem.  i stumbled upon this because the site server’s reporting page would not come up correctly.  i also noticed that when i tried to fire a report from the console, it was trying to go to http://myServer:0/smsreporting_xyz.  i knew that couldn’t be right because the port was usually set to 80 or some other value. i tried to get into the reporting components and received an error.  i thought it was related to the local console at first.  i tried it under my credentials, other credentials, on the server, on my workstation, from the local site server, and from the central site server – which all failed nicely. as a last resort, i used what little i learned in school and actually read the failure message.  if you’ve been reading my blog awhile, then you’re probably well aware that i got nothing out of this message. :) you won’t be able to read the stack trace in the screenshot, but I’v

using powershell to create notification subscriptions for alerts

i must need a refresher on sharpening up my google skillz.  it appears not everyone has adopted the use of “opsmgr” as a short form for system center operations manager 2007.  some prefer just “scom” or “scom 2007”.  anyway, good lesson learned since i tried to find something like this for over a day. stefan koell of code4ward.net (creators of royal ts) wrote up this very handy powershell script to expose what the ui or the system center shell does not.  anyway, there’s little value in repeating the subject in which stefan elaborates quite well.  here’s his blog post on this subject and the powershell script.

atlanta southeast management user group - 6/26/2009

we're holding our 2nd meeting of the year. it's only been ... what six months? we did mms kind of interrupt the usual quarterly schedule. :) anyway, we've got a great line up with some very timely and relevant information. hope you can join us! click here for the agenda details. click here to register for the event! dell is sponsoring our lunches so please be sure to register so we can get an accurate headcount.

retrieving dell warranty data via powershell

first of all, i have to give mad props to mow. he’s crazy good with powershell and deserves massive amounts of respect for his knowledge. i managed to piece together this script from his script on gathering statistical data from the social security website . it was a lot like having 10 of the same pair of everything in different colors and getting dressed in the dark. (no slight to the way you dress, scott. :o) the concept is pretty straight-forward. dell actually (believe it or not) has a URL that you can append a serial to and retrieve warranty data! through the use of such a novel, sophisticated system, we can employ the html scraping method in powershell to retrieve some data. for my own edification, we will walk through the script. i’m well aware you know all this. to begin with, we retrieve the serial # from the command prompt. if it doesn’t exist, we’ll simply quit. $sSerial = "" if ($Args[0] -eq $Null) { Write-Warning "Please provide a serial

issue with conditional forwarding

when working with windows dns, it appears that non-recursive queries do not return conditional forwarders.  it’s tragic in a split-brain situation!  let’s take this scenario for example. i query against my name server for kitchen.home.marcusoh.com.  My name server has a delegation for home.marcusoh.com to another pair of DNS servers.  These servers are for forwarding only and have two conditional forwarders – one that points back to dnsServersA that hold the zone for marcusoh.com and another that points to home.marcusoh.com on dnsServersC. dnsServersA (marcusoh.com) dnsServersB (forwarding) dnsServersC (home.marcusoh.com) zone – marcusoh.com delegated domain – home forwarder – home.marcusoh.com forwarder - marcusoh.com zone – home.marcusoh.com record – kitchen.home.marcusoh.com forwarder – marcusoh.com   (everything above