Tim Mintner : SMS

Auditing BITS 2.0 Settings

tmintner — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 06:28:00 GMT

SMSUtils has a great tool to audit and report on your BITS 2.0 settings for your SMS 2003 Advanced Clients. You can download the tool from here: http://www.smsutils.com/CommunityDownloads/tabid/58/Default.aspx

Here is some background information that I wrote up about the tool a few months ago:

BITS (binary intelligent transfer service) is the technology that SMS uses to determine if a client is connected via a slow link to the SMS server. If BITS is not configured then the client assumes that it can consume all available bandwidth when downloading software packages or running SMS inventory. There Active Directory Group Policy settings that can be set to configure BITS throttling. This scan tool will verify those settings.

In order to manage BITS throttling settings, BITS 2 must be installed. BITS 2 is included with Windows XP SP2. For Windows XP Sp1 systems, Microsoft patch KB842773 must be installed.

With BITS 2, it is possible to manage BITS through five registry entries. These entries are:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\BITS]

"EnableBITSMaxBandwidth"

"MaxTransferRateOnSchedule”

"MaxBandwidthValidFrom"

"MaxBandwidthValidTo"

"MaxTransferRateOffSchedule"

Here is a breakdown of these registry entries:

EnableBITSMaxBandwidth – Values 0 or 1. Turns on BITS throttling
MaxTransferRateOnSchedule – Configures the Maximum amount of bandwidth that BITS can use during working hours. This is configured in Kb/s
MaxBandwidthValidFrom – The time when you want the maximum amount of BITS throttling to start. The time should be entered in 24 hour format
MaxBandwidthValidTo – The time when you want the maximum amount of BITS throttling to end. The time should be entered in 24 hour format
MaxTransferRateOffSchedule – The maximum amount of bandwidth that BITS should use during non working hours. This is configured in Kb/s

These registry settings can also be managed through Group Policy. In order to manage BITS through Group Policy, the Windows XP SP2 group policy templates need to be installed.

The Group Policy settings for BITS are located at: Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Network, Background Intelligent Transfer Service.

There are two settings that can be applied:

Maximum network bandwidth that BITS uses
Timeout (days) for inactive jobs

The BITS audit tool checks for several settings. It will check the Service Pack Level of your Windows XP Systems. If the system is running Windows XP SP1, it will check to see if KB842773 is installed. The BITS audit tool will also gather all of the information inside of the BITS registry keys.

There are three reports available to you:

BITS Settings by Collection - Click on the Values button and choose the Collection that contains your remote site. Click on Display to displey the report
Computers that do not have BITS throttling enabled - This is a report showing all machines within your Collection that do not have BITS throttling turned on, that is they are using all available bandwidth. Please note that only remote sites currently have BITS throttling enabled.
Computers that do not have the BITS patch Installed - This report shows machines with Service Pack 1 that do not have the BITS patch installed.

Update software packages with RSS

tmintner — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 00:26:00 GMT

Have you seen the WIX toolkit yet? WIX is an open source Microsoft project that allows you to create MSI packages using XML. Apparently this is how most of MS creates packages internally. There is a really good blog that explains many of the features that are currently available and will become available in the future. Check it out here: http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/default.aspx

One the most interesting features of this toolset that is under development is the ability for applications to update themselves using RSS feeds. This is really funny to me because when I started getting into RSS about a year and a half ago, I thought why couldn't you use RSS to update your applications and even update your help file documentation real time on your client machines. Well it looks like they are working on doing just that. Check out the article on that feature here: http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/archive/2005/11/08/490448.aspx

This is just entirely too cool of a concept. Imagine sending out an application in a Windows Vista environment that will install in elevated priveleges. When you need to send out an update, you can update your source one place and sign the update with a certificate that will allow the application to update itself with elevated rights. The client could then pull an RSS feed and download and install the update seemless to the end user.

Microsoft releases Desired Configuration Monitoring for SMS 2003

tmintner — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 23:21:00 GMT

Microsoft has quietly released a very nice add on product for SMS 2003 called Desired Configuration Monitoring. This will let you establish a baseline platform and then verify that your systems meet that baseline. This is an awesome addition to SMS that has been badly needed for some time. This feature will be built into SMS V4. You can view the screenshots of this feature in SMS V4 here: http://myitforum.techtarget.com/blog/rcrumbaker/archive/2005/11/17/16971.aspx.

The following programs are required to install the Desired Configuration Monitoring tool:

The prerequisites for installing Desired Configuration Monitoring are as follows:

· The DCM engine and DCM Authoring Tool components: Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1, Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, or Microsoft Windows XP

· DCM Reports component: Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft SMS 2003, and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

You can download this tool from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=93A72AB8-BF54-4607-B9BB-AC9739C6C292&displaylang=en

You can read more information about this tool here:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/cits/mo/sman/dcm.mspx