Andrzej's "IT Thoughts" Weblog

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Moving the Blog to Wordpress

I am moving my blog to http://alipka.wordpress.com . The reason is ... you may be surprised: I am leaving Microsoft, and going to work in another company (you will probably hear soon on that from my new blog). I will still work with Microsoft technologies, Read More...

Posted Sunday, September 14, 2008 9:13 AM by alipka | 1 Comments

SCCM SP1 slipstream setup on SMS 2003 SP2/SP3 site fails to remove SMS_SQL_MONITOR service

As the topic of the post suggests, there is a small bug in the SCCM SP1 slipstream setup. This should make into a KB sooner or later. It occurs ONLY when upgrading from SMS 2003 SP2/SP3 to ConfigMgr 2007 SP1 . Note: Upgrading from SMS 2003 SP2/SP3 to Read More...

Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2008 7:38 PM by alipka | 1 Comments

New (6.0.6278.12) E2k7 OpMGR MP discovery and rule bugs

The just released E2k7 MP has two important bugs in it. I communicated this to the product group, and they are working on releasing a fix. Meanwhile workarounds are (thanks to Ake for quick response to this): 1. Discovery discovers E2k3 clustered backend Read More...

Posted Wednesday, July 16, 2008 2:27 PM by alipka | 0 Comments

Hyper-V Offline backup script

I have created yet another backup script, since the previous one although correct worked only under VMM 2008. And VMM 2008 in its current BETA (+hyper-v patch) is still a bit unstable and the script caused the host to hang for large VM backups. The script Read More...

Posted Tuesday, July 08, 2008 9:51 AM by alipka | 0 Comments

Attachment(s): BackupVMsHyper-V.zip

Writing English documents the "proper" way

While working on internal Hyper-V documentation I wrote over 200 pages of content (mostly technical). I got some reviews by Rob Dendtler (thx Rob!), and the most interesting things I learned from him were not technical, but tips regarding writing style. Read More...

Posted Wednesday, July 02, 2008 2:42 PM by alipka | 2 Comments

Off-topic things and some Hyper-V goodies (resources, backup and AzMan scope scripts)

Lately it's been very quiet on my blog. There are a couple of things to that. First and foremost there was recently a lot going on in my private life, and therefore I had little time to focus on anything else then family (well, I still had and HAVE to Read More...

Posted Wednesday, July 02, 2008 1:26 PM by alipka | 1 Comments

Attachment(s): BackupVMsAndScopeScripts.zip

[off-topic] new 2008 MTB season started!

So a new season for mountain biking started. Actually for me it never ended, since we had a really mild 2007/2008 winter in Poland. But during the time from october 2007 till april 2008 I didn't do any racing, except one 2-day "orientation race" with Read More...

Posted Wednesday, May 14, 2008 9:41 PM by alipka | 0 Comments

OpsMgr 2007 "Registered Servers" in Operations Console

There is a tab when you select Tools->Connect from Ops Console that is called "Registered Servers". It actually will go into your AD and query for CN=SDKServiceSCP, which is a container that stores information on your Management Groups and RMS servers: Read More...

Posted Wednesday, May 14, 2008 12:49 PM by alipka | 0 Comments

What makes an ideal OpsMgr administrator/specialist/consultant?

Walter posted an interesting entry on his blog about OpgMgr 2007 qualifications and requirements: http://wchomak.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!F56EFE25599555EC!969.entry . I must say I fully agree with it and can add some additional input. 1. Responsibility Read More...

Posted Friday, April 18, 2008 11:24 AM by alipka | 0 Comments

System Center Visio Connector available for download

My friend Tomek ( http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/tomek/default.aspx ) pointed me to the new tool for automatic diagram generation of SCCM and SCOM. It has just shown up on Microsoft Downloads: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=521b3884-1eda-4b9d-8ad7-67d00fe9ce8a&displaylang=en&tm Read More...

Posted Sunday, April 06, 2008 10:07 AM by alipka | 0 Comments

OpsMgr 2007 Notifications - issues, customizations

There is a couple of things about OpsMgr 2007 notifications, that may not be so obvious at first sight. Here is a list from my experience. 1. Notifications audit trail So you want to have a trace left about what notification was sent to whom? This is Read More...

Posted Saturday, March 22, 2008 9:29 AM by alipka | 0 Comments

Attachment(s): SetNotificationForAlert.zip

OpsMgr 2007 - noisy Cluster MP (6.0.6277.0) [update]

[update!]: issue is now corrected in 6.0.6277.1 MP, thanks to Marius for quick reaction on this: http://blogs.msdn.com/mariussutara/archive/2008/03/18/update-mp-for-monitoring-cluster-services-mscs-finally-web-released.aspx . Unfortunately that MP has Read More...

Posted Monday, March 17, 2008 3:23 PM by alipka | 1 Comments

OpsMgr: Modified Brian's Scheduled Maintenance Mode MP

Together with my colleague Marek Kuzminski, we have slightly modified Brian's scheduled maintenance mode MP ( Scheduling Groups of Objects for Maintenance Mode ) to add following features: Override by group display name Add additional rules to allow 10 Read More...

Posted Monday, March 10, 2008 8:18 AM by alipka | 14 Comments

Attachment(s): MCS.ScheduledMaintenanceMode.xml

OpsMgr 2007 Powershell one-liner to get information on failed agent installations

Ever tried mass-installing a lot of agents from console? If yes, then you probably miss some feedback information. Once you close the running task window you loose the information. The information is kept, sadly enough in SUCCEEDED Task status - browsing Read More...

Posted Tuesday, March 04, 2008 2:21 PM by alipka | 0 Comments

Ops Mgr 2007 custom MP for monitoring event log size [updated!]

[UPDATE]: I have update the MP in recovery part. It was not possible to override the recovery properly, because using a standard script response does not allow overriding the ARGUMENTS parameter of the script (actually it does allow, but it does not work Read More...

Posted Monday, March 03, 2008 2:00 PM by alipka | 0 Comments

Attachment(s): MCS.EventLogs.xml