UVM Blogs

Anyone who depends on System Center Operations Manager 2012 (or any earlier version of SCOM, back to MOM) likely has noticed that notifications are a bit of a weak spot in the product.

To address this, we have […]

Yesterday I received a strange error report from a person trying to create a new SharePoint site collection.  Our front line guy went to investigate and found that she was getting a “User cannot be found” error […]

wow, really.

Regular readers of my blog (all two of you) may recall the “series” I started this fall on Windows 8 launch devices (concerning the HP Envy X2 and the Samsung SmartPC Pro 700t). These devices both had strengths, […]

Annoying task… configuring VMware View desktops for use in an environment that utilizes VMware View.  Some say, don’t put the management agent on the View desktop, just rebuild your desktops every time there is […]

As promised in my previous post, here is my current VBScript for configuring the Windows 7 Start Menu and Taskbar. Not beautiful, but certainly functional. My thanks to JuliusPIV and cogumel0 for doing the heavy […]

This week I have been working on updating our VMware View template for our public terminals (those are kiosk and lab systems).  As always, simple things have become difficult, and time has disappeared like cookies […]

We are going live with out first public VMware View terminals this week (Wyse P25 “zero-clients”… nice units).  I had what I expected would be a easy list of “little jobs” to be completed before going live. […]

The journey continues…

The boss approved purchase of a Samsung ATIV SmartPC Pro (the “700T” model).  I wassoooexcited… this was the tablet PC I had been waiting for.  Thin, light, and fully convertible from […]

In desperation over our inability to tell University employees what they should be looking for in a Windows 8 tablet, I asked the boss if we could get our hands on one of the new Intel “Atom” processor-based […]

Something that comes up with some frequency on Terminal Servers (or “Remote Desktop Servers”), but perhaps sometimes in VDI, is “How to I move a user profile from one drive to another”. The traditional answers […]

We are in the final stages of preparation for the long-overdue upgrade to SharePoint 2010.  I have set up a preview site with a copy of the production SharePoint content database, and I want to notify all site […]

You would think this one would be easy…

Some of our users were noticing that it was taking over 30 seconds to launch IE to a web site that was configured at the command line (i.e. we run “iexplore.exe […]

vSphere 5.1 arrived this summer to no great fan-fare. We waited a few weeks, heard no sounds of howling pain (we did not listen very hard, I guess), and decided to proceed with upgrading vCenter.  I have been […]

Previously we explored how to increase the success rate of unattended application upgrades using our handy “killAndExec” VBScript. This works well for about 80% of our applications. What about Adobe Reader? […]

Today’s scripting challenge…

We are attempting to use SCCM 2012 as a patch management solution for our centrally supported third party applications.  Great new features in SCCM 2012 allow us to write […]

So Windows 8 is here, to little fanfare at the University.  While I am always happy to have an updated version of Windows to work with, I see that I have yet to blog anything about it.  Perhaps that is because, unlike with the release of Windows 7, there was so little that was relatively [...]

Trouble getting applications developed using .NET Framework 2 or 3 to install on Windows 8 Release Preview? “Error message 0x800f0906:  “Windows couldn’t connect to the Internet to download necessary files. Make sure that you’re connected to the Internet, and click Retry to try again.”?  Me too… Windows 8 features a new “install on demand” model [...]

Mozilla Thunderbird 13 arrived this week.  Guess what?  Our customized build process broke again.  Now, when you start TB for the first time, you get greeted with the option to create a new email account with one of Thunderbird’s “partners” (in other words, email providers who paid for the honor of being put in the [...]

I got stupid again this week and decided to investigate management of Mac computers.  Since we are both cheap and overworked, I wanted a solution that would be both free, and would not require any new infrastructure.  The only options that came to mind were either to extend our OpenLDAP server to support apple schema, [...]

Shortly after releasing MDT 2012 on the general public I got a call from a colleague who told me that his LiteTouch deployment was failing.  He was able to boot to LiteTouch media, go though the configuration wizard, and initiate setup.  LiteTouch would partition the drive, Windows Setup would start, the image would get written [...]

I decided to give some of my user base something that they have been asking for for a long time… the ability to run MDT/LiteTouch deployments entirely from removable storage media. I had avoided doing this in the past as we made significant use of the MDT database in selecting hardware-specific support applications (such as [...]

I have been running Windows 8 CP on my primary workstation for about two weeks now.  The experience is surprisingly good, although I am sure that work-a-day users of Windows are going to freak out at the site of the Metro, especially when accessed from the traditional Windows keyboard and mouse.  To that end, I though [...]

This week I went to rebuild our MS DaRT Emergency Rescue Disk media.  While looking into the available tools to automate injection of our LiteTouch / MDT Deployment Workbench driver store into the DaRT boot media, I discovered something interesting in the MDT 2012 RC1 release notes… MDT 2012 supports the addition of DaRT into the [...]

Today I am attempting to get SharePoint 2010 to work with accounts stored in an Active Directory forest that is external to the SharePoint server.  This would be our “guest forest”.  Lots of tips are available in the net: http://www.marc-lognoul.me/itblog-en/post/2009/05/13/SharePoint-People-Picker-and-Active-Directory-Part-1.aspx <a …[Read more]

We have gone back to the drawing board with SharePoint 2010 planning, and now are challenging some ideas about how authentication must be configured for SharePoint to work with our clients.  Previously, we felt the need to provide multiple supported authenticaiton types (Windows, Basic, and Forms) hosted on different IIS web sites, with unique URL’s [...]

Here we are, working with SCCM again.  Making difficult things possible, and simple things difficult.  Today we wish to distribute a SmartCard driver to all of our managed servers, so that we can require Smart Card for certain classes of logins.  the newer “CNG” Smart Card minidrivers are all simple “.inf” driver packages that you [...]

Following upgrade of our Virtual Center server to the vSphere 5 version, we have been struggling with crashing services and memory exhaustion.  Well, the server got an upgrade from 8Gb to 16Gb of RAM this am, so it is now swimming in excess memory.  Despite this, the Perf Charts in vCenter have gone dead again. [...]

It was inevitable… some people have started to notice that their bloody Multi-Function Devices (the overpriced beasts formerly known as “printer/scanner/copiers”) no longer can scan to our file server.  Why?  Because we got all smarty pants and tried to disabled “NetBT” (NetBIOS over TCP) for access to our new file server.  We figured “Hey, CIFS [...]

We have been tracking a problem with some of our Operations Manager Server 2008 R2 agents. We have a pool of single CPU VMs that have been reporting “Operations Manager Agent CPU too high” alerts every ten hours or so (give or take a few hours). Unfortunately, I am not able to catch the agents [...]

Jumpy mouse and slow console performance on your Server 2008 R2 ESX guests? It is likely that the VMware Tools installer did not activate the VMware video driver. See the following KB:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1011709

The key is to upgrade your current video driver using…[Read more]

In addition to playing Portal 2 (good work, Valve guys!), I have been doing that some of thing called “work”. Today I decided to get back to the question of whether it is possible to enable and disable the Windows file server feature known as “Access Based Enumeration” (or “ABE”) from the command line. Documentation [...]

While developing our new Windows file services infrastructure, we wanted to test our pre-production platform to see if there are any file server-side bottlenecks that will cause unacceptable delays in backup processing. Here are UVM we still are using EMC Networker for Enterprise backup (no comments on our satisfaction with EMC will be provided at [...]

In our final entry in the Windows File Server management with PowerShell series, we have a quick look at managing shares using powershell. The one feature of the NetApp that I will miss most was the automatic home share. Similar to Samba, you can tell the filer a set of directories under which user home [...]

In our old NetApp environment we utilized quotas extensively. We want to map our NetApp quotas to Windows File System Resource Manager quotas in a failrly seamless fashion. Fortunately, with PowerShell, this is almost easy. Microsoft gives us the FSRM.FsrmQuotaManager and FSRM.FsrmQuotaTemplateManager “COM” object classes, documented here: <a …[Read more]

Previously we saw how PowerShell and RoboCopy can be used to sync multi-terabyte file shares from NetApp to Windows. What I did not tell you was that this script choked and died horribly on a single share in our infrastructure. You may have seen it commented out in the previous script? “#,’R25′”? CollegeNet Resource25… my [...]

We are retiring our NetApp filer this year. It was nice knowing you, NetApp. Thank you for the no-hassle performance, agile volume management, and excellent customer support. We will not miss your insane pricing, and subtle incompatibilities with modern Windows clients. In this multi-part series, I will be sharing PowerShell code developed to…[Read more]

Out buddies at MozillaMessaging are at it again… new with Thunderbird 5.0, all of the “jar” files previously present in the Thunderbird installation directory have been collapsed into a single “omni.jar” file, apparently for program load optimization. This all would be fine with me if the omni.jar were a “normal” zip file, and the previous [...]

We have been using the SharePoint automatic site usage confirmation and deletion of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. An annoying aspect of this feature (and there are many) is that if a site that was use in use gets deleted, and we subsequently restore the site, the site still is not confirmed as in use and [...]

Mounting frustration with PGP Whole Disk Encryption has me revisiting BitLocker options this week. We last touched on this subject back in the early days of Vista. It appears that enough has changed with Windows 7 that we need to do some policy updates. First off, I discovered that the BitLocker system volume encryption wizard [...]

On occasion we have found abandoned vmdk files in our vSphere infrastructure. I often have thought we needed to take some time to hunt down and exterminate these orphans. As is often the case, someone else already did the initial research required to make automation of this task possible, but I fou nd I needed [...]

I have been trying to determine if our SCCM service has most of our domain clients registered, and have decided that the WSUS client database may be the best source of information on currently active domain members. As previously mentioned, WSUS is not pre-configured with a lot of useful infrastructure reports, but pulling data out [...]

So we have this wonderful application, “Crystal Reports Server 2008 V1″. Property of SAP, fomerly property of “Business Objects”, formerly property of Seagate Software, formerly… nevermind. CR Server claims to run on IIS, so we had hoped to deploy the new version without needing to add the usual pile of unmaintainable WAMP cruft. Unfortunately, it [...]

Microsoft Campus Agreement includes access to the Microsoft "Diagnostics and Recovery Toolkit" (DaRT), the chief component of which is the Emergency Repair Disk (ERD).  ERD boot images can be found in the Microsoft Campus Agreement share: files.uvm.edumcaWindowsERD DaRT is part of the larger Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).  You can…[Read more]

All of the Server 2003 virtual machines are missing from the WSUS inventory. Poor servers… they are missing the party. Well not really, they are still getting updates, according to the logs. However, they are not reporting in. They are party lurkers. This is an old problem, and only took a little digging. All of [...]

Windows Server Update Service – great service, poor interface. Ever try to manage computers in bulk with the WSUS GUI? You can’t… there are limited filtering and search options, and the GUI hangs a lot when performing group operations. Surely there is a better way… Maybe, at least if you are a programmer. If not, [...]

After many years of saying that we should do it, we have purchased a third-party patch management solution.   The good folks at Secunia cut us a great deal, and we are not in the process of deploying Secunia CSI, which will be integrated with our existing WSUS (Windows Server Update Service) instance.  Here are some [...]

Back in Vista/WinPE2 days, I recall going though some pain trying to load network and storage drivers into a live WinPE instance.  I vaguely recall giving up.  This experience has prevented me from even trying to do such a thing in more recent years.  However, today I really wanted to avoid building new WinPE media [...]

We are piloting a deployment of SCCM 2007 R3 as part of our evaluation of Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010.  I thought I would have SCCM up in a day to a day and a half… Ha!  If you are planning to do something similar, schedule a good four+ days for initial configuration (unless you are [...]

We are now in the process, several years late, of trying to disallow use LM and NTLM authentication on our campus. First attempt? Train Wreck! For stage 1 of enforcement we chose to restrict our domain controllers to accept only NTLMv2 authentication, and reject LM/NTLM. Our thinking was that clients are supposed to negotiage for the [...]