Month: September 2014

Set the allowed Management Points via a Configuration Item in ConfigMgr 2012

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This blog post will be about a new functionality that got introduced in Cumulative Update 3. This is the ability to configure a Management Point (MP) affinity on a client. Justin Chalfant wrote a nice post about this functionality. That post describes the functionality in detail and also shows how it can be configured. The only thing left open is an automated method to configure the MP affinity. This post will fill that small gap by providing a Configuration Item (CI) that contains the scripts to configure the MP affinity. Configuration Item Now let’s start with the details about the CI. Personally I really like this CI, as it’s created in such a way that it doesn’t need any script modifications any more. The discovery …

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What is CMHttpsReadiness.exe?

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This time I’ve got a short post about another executable that I’ve found very useful. It’s CMHttpsReadiness.exe, which belongs to the Configuration Manager HTTPS Readiness Assessment Tool. This tool can be used to check the ConfigMgr clients if they are ready for a switch to HTTPS communication. Basically, it simply checks the certificate requirements on a ConfigMgr client device. To be honest this tool even already existed in ConfigMgr 2007, but in those times the executable was named SCCMNativeModeReadiness.exe. As this tool hasn’t been mentioned a lot, I thought it would be worth a short blog post. Usage This tool is installed during the ConfigMgr client installation and can also be found in the ConfigMgr client installation directory. It can simply be started via the …

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Local Group Policies for WSUS and the Software Update Agent of ConfigMgr 2012

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This blog post will describe a scenario that I ran into this week. Also, to be honest, I wasn’t aware of this exact behavior and, until this moment, I haven’t been able to find any documentation that describes this behavior. Scenario The scenario is that the customer wants to have the ConfigMgr client deployed on their server environment. This server environment is currently patched by using different methods and one of them is WSUS. So far, nothing weird, but the servers patched by WSUS are configured via local group policies. Behavior I think that by now everybody knows that the ConfigMgr client uses the local group policy Specify intranet Microsoft update service location to point to the WSUS server of the ConfigMgr environment, if, of …

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Different methods to set the User Device Affinity for usage during and after a task sequence in ConfigMgr 2012

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Last week I’ve got a question about setting the User Device Affinity (UDA) during the task sequence. Well, actually the question was more about the easiest way to do this. I didn’t have a direct answer, as it’s of course also a relative question. The easiest way can be different depending on the current configuration. In this post I will go through three methods that can be used to set the UDA, so it can be used during and after the task sequence. For usage during the task sequence, think about something like installing user-targeted applications during the task sequence and for usage after the task sequence, think about the pre-deploy software to the user’s primary device option. Before using the first, or the second …

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