In our SCCM test environment we were installing this months Microsoft Security Updates and noticed on one test machine that all the Office 2003 Updates were failing. I hadn't seen this before, so I started to do a little digging. Knowing that SCCM really doesn't do much but call the Windows Update Agent components, I…
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Today I received an email from a tech who complained that the Configuration Manager administrator console we have installed on a Windows 2003 terminal server was hosed up. I've seen this happen in a few instances. I'm not entirely sure why the console just sits hung, but the solution that I've seen work most often…
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It's been a long time coming, and I'm very excited for the release of Configuration Manager v.Next. Listed below are just some of the bullet points in this release. You can see the full announcement here. Today we are very excited to announce the release of Beta 1 for System Center Configuration Manager v.Next. System…
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Error code 1603 by definition is just a generic windows installer (MSIexec) fatal error code. Yesterday I was seeing this for a software package deployment. The interesting part of this was this was an application that was packaged for us by a third party vendor (a vendor that will remain nameless, but has created some…
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When I got into the office this morning an email came in from one of our technicians. The issue was that he couldn't see the All Systems collection anymore and wanted me to put it back. Since I know I didn't do this, I took a look at Status Message Queries to see what happened. I…
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Here's a query that I use to see all machines who haven't rebooted in 7 days. You can change the 7 to however many days you want. select SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceID,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceType,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Name,SMS_R_SYSTEM.SMSUniqueIdentifier,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Client from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_OPERATING_SYSTEM on SMS_G_System_OPERATING_SYSTEM.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where DATEDIFF(DD, SMS_G_System_OPERATING_SYSTEM.LastBootUpTime, GETDATE()) > 7
Over the past couple of days I've been fighting with an application that a 3rd party vendor packaged for us. The package in question is an MSI that calls numerous other files. In total, the package has over 3000 files and is about 180 MB in size. Issue The issue that was reported to me…
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Today I was noticing on a few of our advertisements that all of our machines in the collection had received the "Program failed (download failed - content mismatch)" failure message. Upon receiving this error message, I came across a blog post by Matthew Boyd that referred to the following: Binary Differential Replication – If this…
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So tonight my hard drive in my home theater PC decided it was a good time to crash during a movie the girlfriend and I were watching. I heard a whirr, some nasty scratching, and a few minutes later the screen just went blank. After taking the machine apart, the drive wouldn't power up, it…
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We live in a society today that's "always on". People have mobile devices, laptops, desktops, HTPCs, etc. that are always connected to the internet and at the click of a button we can order an HDTV and have it shipped to our house within a few days. We never have to leave the house anymore…
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