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Showing posts from October, 2009

how to keep your sysinternals tools in sync …

here is quite possibly the easiest way i’ve found to sync them up.  sometime last year, sysinternals made all of their tools accessible directly from the web.  this means no more having to go download the tools.  you could launch them or pull them down via live.sysinternals.com. to go one step further on this bit of information, live.sysinternals.com\tools is directly accessible via explorer, cmd shell, powershell, etc.  this is demonstrated as such:   well, now that opens up a variety of different options to sync your copy.  explorer would be easiest for drag and drop.  if you’re familiar with any of the copy utilities, this should be old hat to you.  for me, i favor robocopy in this scenario:   to sync them in the future, you’d run the same command again.  just in case you missed it, here it is: robocopy \\live.sysinternals.com\tools . *.exe

authoring resource kit released for opsmgr 2007 r2

microsoft just released the authoring resource kit last night.  it looks quite helpful!  i’m about to fire it up and see what it’s all about.  here’s the posted feature summary: Authoring Console - Develop MPs within a GUI environment. Management Pack Best Practice Analyzer (MPBPA) MPBPA scans management packs for best practice compliance and provides automated resolution for numerous issues. This tool integrates with the Authoring Console. Management Pack Spell Checker (MP Spell Checker) MP Spell Checker checks spelling in management packs to eliminate errors in display strings. Management Pack Visio Generator (MP Visio Generator) MP Visio Generator allows you to generate a class inheritance and class relationship diagram using Microsoft Office Visio. Management Pack Diff (MP Diff) MP Diff shows the differences between two management packs.

health service handle count threshold for exchange mp

another admin pointed out something very odd with this particular monitor.  apparently, the monitor has some overrides that change the threshold in certain scenarios.  to start, the monitor description: This monitor ensures that the "Process\Handle Count" counter for the HealthService.exe process does not exceed a set threshold over a series of consecutive samples.  If the conditions are met this monitor will change to a critical state, which will then roll up to the "Health Service State" monitor.  The "Health Service State" monitor is configured to run a recovery when its state is critical, which will automatically attempt to restart the Health Service. basically once you breach this number, the health service restarts.  this is typically a good thing since you’re keeping it maintained.  now, flip to the overrides. notice that there’s an exchange 2007 computer group override where the value is 5000.  try to edit this override.  you should

logsmith 1.2 released – includes event parameters!

stefan koell of code4ward.net does it again with an update to logsmith.  this time, you can see the parameters of the events you’re collecting.  very cool gem for opsmgr!  get more detail HERE at systemcentercentral.com. this is a screenshot of log smith in action from system center central .

clearing opsmgr agent cache from the console …

i just ran across this.  could be deeply embedded or something or not well advertised.  anyway, here’s the navigation path if you want to flush the health service state and cache from an agent via the console. first of all, navigate to the agent health state view.  [monitoring / operations manager / agent / agent health state ] you’ll see two panes at this point: agent state from health service watcher and agent state.  we only care about the agent state pane.  click on the agent that you’re going to send the missile.  in your actions pane, you will see “flush health service state and cache”.

adjusting “failed to send notification using server/device”

the actual rule name is “Failed to send through device alerting rule” that we’ll be working with.  i’m not going to go into length explanations since this is fairly straightforward.  just a few things that i wanted to point out (mainly links to good info).  basically, this alert has no overrides that are useful.  it kept sending out messages that looked like this: Notification subsystem failed to send notification using device/server ‘sip.myDomain.com' over 'sip' protocol to 'sip:myUser@myDomain.com'. Microsoft.Collaboration.SignalingException: The requested operation failed.: Sip response: Temporarily Unavailable (0x1e0). Rule id: Subscriptione94d0bc3_ff32_48dc_8e96_3fdda0ba1663 this tends to come up often if the user is not online when the alert is sent through.  i suppose you could try to limit the number of times you’d run into this scenario by adjusting the hours that IM is used for alert notification (or not using it at all).  i opted to create an iden

list domain controllers with powershell

for my own edification and later reference.   to start, let's grab the current domain. $myDomain = [System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.Domain]::GetCurrentDomain()   just for fun, we’ll look at the forest. $myDomain.Forest   now, let’s list the domains of the forest. $myDomain.Forest.Domains   this will count every domain controller in every domain. $myDomain.Forest.Domains | % { $_.DomainControllers.Count }   for a final count, we’ll add all the numbers together into $myCount. $myDomain.Forest.Domains | % { $myCount = $_.DomainControllers.Count + $myCount}   to list all of the domain controllers, we can run this command. $myDomain.Forest.Domains | % { $_.DomainControllers } | Select-Object name   finally, another way to count all of the domain controllers in the forest. ($myDomain.Forest.Domains | % { $_.DomainControlle

most valuable professional award!

looks like i’m in for another year in the system center operations manager discipline.  congratulations to all of the rest of you who are either new or renewed this month. “Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in System Center Operations Manager technical communities during the past year.”