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Showing posts from November, 2009

forcing a task sequence to rerun … from powershell

well, kind of.  steve rachui wrote this genius little gem about how to manage the instances of the configmgr agent scheduler to manipulate a task sequence to rerun .  as you’ll note in the post, he didn’t indicate a method to automate it.  this is actually rather easy to accomplish from powershell. first of all, our example … we’ll use steve’s screenshots as reference.  here’s the id that we want to get rid of: CEN20018-CEN00027-DBBBC9D6 . to be quite veracious and unerring, we should use the exact task sequence id in question.  we can set that to a variable just for kicks. $tsid = “CEN20018”   alright, now that we have that, let’s examine the command we’re going to use.  to get information out of wmi, we have to use the get-wmiobject cmdlet.  ordinarily, you could just provide the class name you want to look at, but as steve noted in his post, you need to connect to a different namespace: root\ccm\scheduler.  let’s retrieve all the classes of this namespace using –list.   get-w

Active Directory Cookbook 3rd Edition

just wrote a short review about active directory cookbook, 3rd edition. this is one of the most useful books in my library. Originally submitted at O'Reilly When you need practical hands-on support for Active Directory, the updated edition of this Cookbook provides quick solutions to more than 300 problems you might encounter when deploying, administering, and automating Microsoft's network directory service. You'll find recipes for the Lightwe... Active Directory Cookbook Fan of the Series 5out of 5 Pros: Easy to understand, Well-written, Helpful examples, Accurate, Concise Best Uses: Intermediate, Expert Describe Yourself: Sys Admin I became a fan of the series when Robbie Allen released the very first one. Since then, I've been hooked. It's amazing how the book has developed over time to become the monstrosity that it is today. It's enormous, weighing in at over 1000 pages. Though the true value is in all

social software in the workplace - magic quadrant 2009

right up there with ibm and jive software.  hope they’re not talking about lotus notes!  ;) full details for this and other magic quadrant reports are located here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/itanalyst/default.mspx .

xian wings 2010 announcement eminent

i just got this little piece of information from my favorite sales girl at jalasoft.  it looks like they’re extending your view of the network to your mobile device.  now you can know when your datacenter is on fire while you’re enjoying your stouffer’s frozen dinner and watching an episode of flashforward.  here’s the blurb: “Jalasoft informed today to a close network of contacts that they are going to announce the release of Xian Wings 2010. Wings 2010 will be part of the Xian suite and will make it possible for network and server administrators to gain better control of their environments thanks to a special client application that works on their mobile device.” fabulous!

moving configmgr package shares to an alternate location

ever since sms got into the business of managing security updates, it’s been a struggle trying to make sure that distribution points are sized right for the amount of content they’re going to be hosting.  we’re all clowns in a circus and should be quite adept at juggling by now.  :) once you’re beyond that small hurdle, you may find yourself in the same pickle when you start venturing into OSD.  even in a san world where drive space can magically show up on your server, it’s still often easier to get additional drive space than it is to increase existing drive space. i had to do a bit of reshuffling recently and found this blog post from the manageability team blog immensely helpful:  http://blogs.technet.com/smsandmom/archive/2008/09/04/moving-the-smspkgc-share-to-a-different-drive.aspx . there is one caveat though that my coworker enlightened me about.  if you’re using bits-enabled distribution points (and i imagine the majority of us are), you’ll want to make one additional ch