This is an excellent tool that I used extensively and I’m pleased that its been released so soon.

You can download it from:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=29268

Information is available on TechNet:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh920821.aspx

Enjoy!

John Riseam

System Center Consultant

Risual

Hi There,

There are a number of underlying permissions that must be granted in order for a user to be able to successfully initiate a console session to an SCCM environment.

Firstly you need to make sure the user has the correct site permissions… for example, a user requiring Remote Control access may have the following user rights;

• Collection
  • Read, Use Remote Tools, Read Resource

• Site
  • Read

Secondly this user must reside in the relevant site servers Local Group – ‘SMS Admins’. SMS Admins is generally nested in another Local Group – ‘Distributed COM Users’, and you need to check this is the case as well.

Finally, and this was the first time I’ve had to do this for a permission related issue – (and I’ve not discovered the reason why this bit of configuration had been changed or deleted) – you need to make sure that SMS Admins OR the user group containing the Remote Control users has permissions over WMI. To do this you can perform the following;

• Navigate to Server Manager
• Expand Configuration
• Select ‘Properties’ of the WMI Control Object
• Select the Security Tab
• Expand Root
• Select the SMS Folder, and choose Security

• • SMS Admins (or the group containing your users) should have the following permissions;
    • Enable Account
    • Remote Enable

• Select the site_<SiteCode> folder under SMS, and choose Security
  • SMS Admins (or the group containing your users) should have the following permissions;
    • Execute Methods
    • Provider Write
    • Enable Account
    • Remote Enable

That should be enough for your console connectivity to return

Thanks,
SteveH

All the System Center 2012 code has hit MSDN and is available for download.

This includes

• Unified Installer
• Orchestrator
• Service Manager
• App Controller
• Virtual Machine Manager
• Data Protection Manager
• Configuration Manager
• Operations Manager

John Riseam

System Center Consultant

Risual

Hi there,

I came across an issue recently with a child primary site that had failed to replicate a number of resources from it’s parent site.

After working through some of these issues, and rectifying the replication I needed to perform a full child resync.

This is simple to do by running the following command;

• Preinst.exe /CHILDSYNC <SiteCode>   ~ from the parent site

However an error was returned straight away stating that;

• Cannot connect to SQL Database
• <SiteCode> is not a known site

It turned out that this was because the account that I was using to run this did not have Site Modify permissions on the Parent Site. These permissions also need to be assigned directly to the account (not via a Security Group)

Once this was done, I re-run the command and a resync occurred.

Thanks,
Steve

Hi there,

Whilst re-building my lab on Server 8 Beta I came across an issue with running Vyatta which I use as a software router/firewall.

I attached the network cards as synthetic NICs and upon boot received the following error;

Spurious ACK on isa0060/serio0. Some program migh be trying to access hardware directly.

This error hangs the machine and you have to end the task to regain control.

After attempting to turn off all the advanced features of the card, e.g. SR-IOV and VMQ I was still having no luck. As a final attempt I selected the NIC and disconnected it from a vSwitch leaving it ‘Not Connected’, and booted the machine. It worked! I then reconnected the network once the router had booted and I could configure and routing worked as usual

This is only suitable in a LAB environment and would not be a solution if you were attempting to use this in production as if for any reason the router rebooted it would hang on reload. Additionally, I have not done anything in the way of performance testing as I assume the reason for the initial error is driver related.

Thanks,
SteveH

Hi There,

When the need arises to remove a Site System from DP the first thing you need to do is remove all of the roles from the Site System. However, often when you are doing this you find that the ‘ConfigMgr Component Server’ role persists which stops you from deleting the system.

Generally just leaving this for a few hours, or a couple of days works however if you are in a rush (as we all usually are!) then a quick fix is to edit another role on another site system, e.g. edit the deletion policy on a State Migration Point role. Wait for 10-15 seconds after doing that and the component server should remove on your other site system and you should get the option to delete.

As per this thread;

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/configmgrgeneral/thread/ec99a141-bede-4922-a9e9-e6605b1a7dab/

Cheers,

I was recently on a customer site and had configured the Synchronization Service including creating Management Agents, projections, joins etc. I then realised i had not installed update 2 for FIM, so i proceeded to download and install the update through windows update only to be met with the following error:

Error 25070.Error connecting to database FIMSynchronizationService. Invalid class string

Doh! Silly me, with the databases homed on a remote SQL server the SQL Native Client must be installed on the FIM server. I had forgotten to do this, after doing so the update completed without issue

Recently I had the need to do a quick and dirty fix of a couple of virtual applications that had been deployed to users in an environment that uses App-V with SCCM integration. Applications are advertised to users based upon AD Security Group membership and are configured to download and execute, rather than stream from a DP.

Without going into the reasons behind why this can happen (that’s another post) – I’ll demonstrate how to quickly resolve the error and get the user back up and running. Before proceeding make sure you have got SCCM Client Center

A error of this kind would be seen by the user when attempting to launch the broken application, e.g. ;

1. Find the package ID of the affected virtual application
2. Connect to the users SCCM cache (%windir%\system32\CCM\cache) and see if the source files for the affected application are still there (use the package ID to find the folder)
3. If the cached package is still there, load SCCM client center, navigate to Agent Actions > Cache and delete the package from here (this will ensure it is not orphaned)
4. From within Client Center > Client Actions run a Download & Apply User (or machine) policy
5. On the affected machine, restart the SMS Agent Host Service (or reboot)
6. From within Client Center > Advertisements, re-run the advertisement for the failed virtual application

You should now see the application begin to download into the SCCM cache, and once complete the package should register itself with the App-V client and once again be functional.

If this fails your App-V cache may be corrupt. To resolve this you can use SFTMIME which is a tool contained within the App-V client installation directory. The following command can be used to clear all applications from within the cache;

• sftmime.exe remove obj:app /global /complete

Please note, this command will remove all applications from the App-V client, and the user running the command must have administrative permissions.

A full reference for SFTMIME can be found here;

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc817090.aspx

Thanks,
SteveH

Hi There,

During testing of a SHIM to fix an application, I accidentally deleted the SDB file from C:\Windows\AppPatch\Custom, rather than using the sdbinst -u <guid> command to uninstall properly. Whilst attempting to re-run this command I was hit with the following error;

This error was preventing me from using sdbinst to reinstall the SHIM.

The solution is pretty simple – there are two locations in the registry that need removing;

• HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\<GUID>.sdb
• HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\InstalledSDB\<GUID>

Delete these and you will then be able to re-import your custom SHIM.

Thanks
SteveH

Hi There,

Whilst working on a bare-metal build for a Hyper-V host (based on HP blades with iLO 3) today using SCVMM 2012 and Host Profiles I came across the following error;

An out of band operation (IPMI) for the BMC <FQDN> failed

The obvious first line of troubleshooting is to check the IP address of the iLO connection was working (and that we had typed it right). This checked out, so the next check was to make sure the account we are using to access iLO has the necessary permissions to the host, and to check that IPMI commands are being accepted by iLO. This checked out as well and left us stumped!

After some further troubleshooting, we decided to re-create the account we had access to in iLO. We were not using the default ‘Administrator’ account, rather another delegated account that had been created for us.

We deleted this account, and re-created it using the same username/password to be greeted with an error along the lines of the username we are selecting has over 16 characters and therefore cannot be used to send IPMI commands….. however can still be created…..hmmm!

So let’s try shortening the account name, which we did, then changed the run-as account in SCVMM, re-ran the job and as if by magic our hosts started to boot

Cheers
SteveH