Month: April 2014

Add Update Content to a Deployment Package via PowerShell in ConfigMgr 2012

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Last week I read a forum question about downloading updates in a software update group. I thought that I could create an easy example, but it wasn’t all as easy as I thought it would. As there is no cmdlet available that performs this specific action, I went back to WMI. In WMI there is a method AddUpdateContent in the SMS_SoftwareUpdatesPackage that should do the trick. After playing around with it for a while I noticed that this method is not as straight-forward as it looks. The method The main problem I had with this method, was the documentation, or better, the lack of documentation. The SDK only contains a very old example that also doesn’t seem to use the right order for the parameters. …

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Verify local administrators via PowerShell and Compliance Settings in ConfigMgr 2012

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Everybody probably knows the inventory posts for local administrators by Sherry Kissinger, but what if you want to know the compliance of your devices. What if you “just” want to know if a device is compliant to company defaults for the local administrators. This blog post will provide an answer to that question. It will provide a script, including explanation, that can be used for compliance checks. This blog post won’t go into details about creating the Configuration Item and the additional Configuration Baseline. Script The script that will be the core of this Configuration Item consists of three key parts. Basically, it first finds the members of the local administrators group on the device, then verifies these members and in the end it returns …

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What is smsdpusage.exe?

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This time I’ve got another short post, which could be seen as a sort of follow-up on last weeks post. As this post is also about an executable that is used within a scheduled task. Since ConfigMgr 2012 R2 there is a new built-in report named Distribution point usage summary. This report can be used to view details about how individual distribution points are utilized, including how many unique clients access the distribution point, how many request are processed by the distribution point and how much data is send from the distribution point. To generate content for these reports there is a new executable named smsdpusage.exe. This executable starts the distribution point usage process. When this process starts, it evaluates the IIS logs, of the …

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What is smsdpmon.exe?

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A short post this time with an even short title. As I was working on documenting the content library and its content validation, one of the things I ran into was smsdpmon.exe. As I was not familiar with this executable, I thought it would be a good idea to write about my findings on it. This executable is used to start the content validation process. The validated content can be anything that is distributed to the distribution point and available in the content library. When the content validation process starts, ConfigMgr verifies the hash of the content files on the specific distribution point with the hash in the database and if the hash is unexpected for the content files on the distribution point, it creates …

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Five key configuration steps for implementing Internet-based clients in ConfigMgr 2012

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This blog post is about the key configuration steps for implementing Internet-based clients in ConfigMgr 2012. By key configuration steps, I’m talking about the configuration of the web server certificate, IIS, site systems, site system roles and client installations. To understand these steps, knowledge of certificates, IIS and ConfigMgr is required, because it’s not a step-by-step configuration guide. Prerequisites Before going through these steps, there are a few important prerequisites that should be in place: Site systems for Internet-based client management must have connectivity to the Internet and must be in an Active Directory domain. A supporting public key infrastructure (PKI) has to be in place, that can deploy and manage the certificates that the clients require and that are managed on the Internet and …

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