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Showing posts from November, 2011

sccm: computers with names greater than 15 characters

and coincidentally, blog posts with really long titles. if you run into scenarios where you find that computers with longer than 15 characters are exhibiting strange issues in an application, you can root out these computers with configmgr or AD. while the computer itself may show a longer than 15 character machine name, the records for it in AD and configmgr show a truncated value. this is interesting because the computer is registered with its long name in DNS. it can "interesting" when you see a truncated name that doesn't resolve (especially where WINS is involved and handles the resolution for netbios lookup adding further confusion.) funny enough, where you root out this problem exists kind of on the same plane for both AD and configmgr. it's the DNS host name that gives it away! take a look a these screenshots -- from SCCM and AD, respectively: (removed the computer names out of this screenshot) so what do you do with this information, now that you know?

sccm: how old is my data?

here is something I wrote up not too long ago for the benefit of some of my coworkers. it's nothing new and might be what most of you know, but I wanted to post it up just in case. it's a question I'm asked often... so it seemed like something worthy of sharing.   How old is my data? Let me first summarize a few things. SCCM is generally configured to hold a set amount of data per given data type. In some cases, you may find that you have data that is older than the specified age value (90 today, 30 sometime soon). So what’s going on here? The short answer is, the data is still current. There are many things that comprise the composite object record. Let’s take my client for example. Here is a screen shot: As you will notice, Agent Name, Agent Site, and Agent Time all contain numbers in brackets. The [#] is an index of the property, so to speak. For example, if I were interested in Heartbeat Discovery, I would read the values this way: Agent Name[0] : Heartbeat Di