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Category Archives: General Discussion

Everything that goes on here.

Planetside 2 and MLG…

So I’ve been playing Planetside 2 lately.  I’ve been playing as New Conglomerate with an outfit called The Iron Wolves [TIW] on Waterson.  Coincidentally Planetside 2 is heading towards MLG and in the war report interview this past Sunday Higby in an interview with Alex “Jax” Conroy has revealed a lot of what that will entail (finally!).

Anyway, I’ve not made a post since mother’s day so I thought I’d link the youtube replay of our match from this past Friday against VREV and TRAF.  The second objective battle is by far one of the best (in around 10 minutes), with the third base capture having some entertaining points.

Happy Mothers Day…

On the very early morning of December 27th 2007, my wife became more than herself.  She became a mother.

She worked, and toiled to do everything she could to ensure that this new life dependent on her had everything he needed.  Her self interest and importance became a secondary drive towards that of the new calling she found in Will.  Even leaving her job to become a stay at home mom to care for this new addition to our family.

Then again, on a very early morning of Sept 7th 2010, my wife moved forward to become a mother to yet another child.  Our sweet little baby girl Maggie.  Our daughter however had special needs; and my wife, the mother, heeded the heightened call and began working continually with her to try and better her.  Reaching to a place in her heart, and physical being to produce an endurance that surpasses my understanding.  To show interest to our son, to let him know that he too is loved, and that his little sister was a joy, not a burden to take his mommy from him.

When we thought we could take no more, that our line was running short; this beautiful woman found she was pregnant with our next child.  Born Sept 17th 2012 was Jake, and she again found a level of endurance and ability that makes me feel as if I’m hopelessly left behind as she runs this marathon.  Catching but a glimpse of her dust as she carries on in this race.  Carrying the burdens of bottles, therapies, dinners, diapers, discipline, she shows a compassion and a heart that could only be found in a mother.

Amanda, you are amazing.  I’m thankful to God that I have a wife like you, and am ever impressed with you, the mother.

I love you.

Create Boundary Script for CM 2012…

As some of you know, I’ve been working on CM 2012 for a while now, and establishing a hierarchy.  One of the unfortunate tasks with this job has been boundary creation.  Finally after a longer period than it should have taken I went to build a tool to create site boundaries for me out of a csv, similar to tools with SCCM 2007.

I found the sms_boundary class hadn’t changed (outside of an obsolete boundaryflag property) so I decided to test it out with powershell as a one liner, and it worked great.  I did a bit more research and stumbled across something already written by MVP Kaido Järvemets from Estonia, and enjoyed his minimalistic script for it so I followed his methodology (mostly) and ended up with this script that reads from a boundaries.csv file

boundary

 

$sitecode = "ABC"
$siteserver = "mysiteserver"
$boundarylist = Import-Csv '.\boundaries.csv'

foreach($Item in $boundarylist)
{Switch($item.'type')
	{"Subnet" 	{$Type = 0}    
	 "AD" 		{$Type = 1}
     "IPv6" 	{$Type = 2}
     "Range" 	{$Type = 3}}
$arrValues = @{DisplayName = $Item.description; BoundaryType = $Type; `
Value = $Item.boundary}
Set-WmiInstance -Namespace "Root\SMS\Site_$sitecode" -Class SMS_Boundary `
-Arguments $arrValues -ComputerName $siteserver}

Not to take credit for other peoples work, especially since this is a hacked up version of his original which can be found here.

Sad day…

image

All that remains.

Farewell friend…

So last week we lost our second dog to cancer. My corgi Keenan who’s been with us for 9 years has left us. I’ve not really been able to talk or write about it but my wife has done a good job with it here: http://thebelcherfamily4.blogspot.com/2013/03/farewell-friend.html?m=0

I loved that dog, and am thankful for the time we had with him. He’s been with us a relatively long time.

There is definitely something missing in our home now.

Query Reboot Suppression CM2012…

Laziness is the true mother of necessity I think in IT, and the tedious act of viewing multiple properties pages brought about this one liner.  If you too are setting up diverse deployment sets and need to quickly verify multiple deployments for reboot supression state. Here’s a way to do it in powershell:

gwmi -namespace "root\sms\site_<sitecode>" 
-query "select assignmentname from sms_updategroupassignment 
where assignmentname like '%<NAME SEARCH VALUE>%' and suppressreboot = '3'"
 -ComputerName <SITESERVERNAME> |Select -Property assignmentname

<chopped up for readability sake>

Suppressreboot values:
0 = No Suppression
1 = Workstation Suppression
2 = Server Suppression
3 = Server & Workstation Suppression

replace <> values with your relevant search criteria.

More class information.

Yes. This…

Just a link, but well done.

http://martinvalasek.com/blog/pictures-from-a-developers-life

Animated gifs to describe the day to day of a developer; or most personnel in an engineering level role of IT.

WSUS Post Installation Configuration Task Failed…

So this is a quick blog for a frustrating issue, that is actually very easy to resolve.

If you are on Windows Server 2012, and you’ve had to reinstall WSUS for any reason and receive the following error in your tmp log after attempting to finalize the installation:

2013-02-20 16:04:17  Creating default subscription.

2013-02-20 16:04:17  Instantiating UpdateServer

2013-02-20 16:04:19  CreateDefaultSubscription failed. Exception: System.Net.WebException: The request failed with HTTP status 503: Service Unavailable.

   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.ReadResponse(SoapClientMessage message, WebResponse response, Stream responseStream, Boolean asyncCall)

   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] parameters)

   at Microsoft.UpdateServices.Internal.ApiRemoting.GetServerVersion()

   at Microsoft.UpdateServices.Internal.DatabaseAccess.AdminDataAccessProxy.GetServerVersion()

   at Microsoft.UpdateServices.Internal.BaseApi.UpdateServer.CreateUpdateServer(String serverName, Boolean useSecureConnection, Int32 portNumber)

   at Microsoft.UpdateServices.Internal.BaseApi.UpdateServer..ctor(Boolean bypassApiRemoting)

   at Microsoft.UpdateServices.Setup.StartServer.StartServer.CreateDefaultSubscription()

2013-02-20 16:04:19  StartServer encountered errors. Exception=The request failed with HTTP status 503: Service Unavailable.

2013-02-20 16:04:19  Microsoft.UpdateServices.Administration.CommandException: Failed to start and configure the WSUS service

   at Microsoft.UpdateServices.Administration.PostInstall.Run()

   at Microsoft.UpdateServices.Administration.PostInstall.Execute(String[] arguments)

It’s most likely an IIS issue.

Open the IIS console, delete the WSUS Site, and perform the post installation tasks again.

Maintaining/Spinning Up a Large CM 12 Environment…

Something like that anyway….

 

I plan on posting more stuff in the future after things have normalized.

Site Backup Failed on SQL Cluster CM12 SP1…..

Soooo……

After GatherWriterMetadata SMS Writer status = FAILED_AT_PREPARE_BACKUP. SMS_SITE_BACKUP 2/4/2013 3:32:38 PM 8500 (0x2134)
Error: VSS_E_WRITERERROR_TIMEOUT. Error Code = 0x80,042,3f2. SMS_SITE_BACKUP 2/4/2013 3:32:38 PM 8500 (0x2134)

vssadmin list writers

Capture

hmmmm, it’s there.  Let me check the sms_site_sql_backup service on the database servers.

Ok, lets check our permissions on the servers to make sure machines have local admin, share permissions, and that they have SA rights.

Hmmm, are the backup components installed on the SQL nodes?

They are,  sorta, but aren’t installed on the static drives of our SQL server nodes, this is a problem…

 

It all starts with our old friend NO_SMS_ON_DRIVE.SMS

 

So make sure it’s where it needs to be, like on SAN drives.  Especially a SANS drive tied to SQL Cluster that will be failing over.  You don’t want to manually re-point components; but in case you do (or in our case NEED to)…. here’s how:

Get on every drive that DOESN’T need sms site components installed to them and place NO_SMS_ON_DRIVE.SMS in their root.

Now open your registry on the site server and go to:

hklm\Software\Microsoft\SMS\Components\SMS_SITE_COMPONENT_MANAGER\Multisite Component Servers\<servername>\Installation Directory

Change this path to the preferred static drive on the respective servers.  Now:

net stop sms_site_component_manager
net stop sms_executive
net start sms_site_component_manager

Now check sitecomp.log for your server name, verify the installation and connection.  Now lets check the local drives of the component sql server and verify the installation path we declared earlier.

Is it there?  If so, great, if not….

Open services and look for:

SMS_SITE_SQL_BACKUP_<site servername>

Go to properties and check it’s local path.

Stop the SMS_SITE_SQL_BACKUP_<site servername> service

Now open the registry and go to

hklm\System\CurrentControlSet\services\SMS_SITE_SQL_BACKUP_*\ImagePath

Specify the local drive and path you wish to use and now move the contents from the previous service to it’s new home.

You’ll need to verify and do the same for the log files:

hklm\Software\Microsoft\SMS\Tracing\SMS_SITE_SQL_BACKUP<site servername>\TraceFilename

Now:

Start the SMS_SITE_SQL_BACKUP_<site servername> service

Rinse, and repeat until they are where they need to be, and finally perform and verify the backup completes:

(from the site server)

net start sms_site_backup

and watch the smsbkup.log

Props to MS PFE Sean MAHONEEEEEEY! For his assistance