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December 2004 - Posts

Whilst I was downloading several MOM management packs, I came across a link which said “Sign up for Download Notifications” and pointed me to: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=39737 .

After following a few links I managed to sign up for a shed load of emails from Microsoft. Time will tell just how many of them are useful/of any use.

One mildly amusing thing (from my point of view) is that I can sign up for different language versions of their main emails  . One annoying thing (from my point of view) is they don't provide English/UK versions of all of their English/US mailings  .

For those of you who have tried, the current release of the latest MS04–028 Scan Update tools (as previously mentioned) won’t upgrade a previous installation of itself. It reports:

MS04-028 Update Scan Tool error message

Which isn’t good – especially considering that the new version has the version number. 2.50.3174.2100! While I consider the possibility that a programmer became confused between the comparison symbols < and > (and occasionally that happens to me too!) you can get around this problem by uninstalling the old version and then installing the new one.

Happy patching  .

I’ve been a subscriber to the MSSMS list on ListLeagues for a few weeks now.

And one thing that gets me is that there are loads over posters in the USA, but seemingly none in the UK – apart from myself – although I think there are a couple in other parts of Europe.

As it is I’ve recently posted something to the MSSMS list about the to be mentioned update to the MS04–028 scan tool and I’m currently waiting for an official response. Yet it’s gone half six in the evening here.

There’s taking your work home with you, and there’s taking your work home with you!

All,

Hot on the news that Microsoft have re-released the MS04–028 scanner (that scans for the GDI+ vulnerability): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c4745685-9521-4b63-a338-0b3e2dcbf2bb , I want to know how people keep up to date with these developments (and other announcements) from Microsoft?

I’ve found a solution to my issue with SP1.

It’s a report titled “Software updates with count of applicable and installed computers” (ID#146) which not only lists the most requested patch at the very top, but also allows you to sort numerical columns!

Cut, paste and amend the following URL:

http:// server>/SMSReporting_/Report.asp?ReportID=146 .

Following on from “Don’t believe Windows Updates”, SMS ships with a report that lists the “Software updates for a specific system”. This isn’t exactly what I want as it lists both installed and uninstalled updates. However, it’s a pretty simple matter to clone that report and produce one called “Software updates not installed for a specific system” which is more like what I want:

select summ.ID, summ.QNumbers, summ.Title, summ.Product, summ.LocaleID,
       summ.Language, summ.InfoPath from v_R_System sys
join v_GS_PatchStatus ps on sys.ResourceID=ps.ResourceID
join v_ApplicableUpdatesSummary summ on ps.ID=summ.ID and ps.QNumbers=summ.QNumbers and ps.Product=summ.Product and ps.LocaleID=summ.LocaleID and ps.Title=summ.Title where sys.Netbios_Name0 like @Name and ps.LastState!=105
order by summ.ID

But never satisfied until I can get one report that does it all, I cloned and massaged the above to give me “Software updates not installed for a specific collection”:

select sys.Name0, summ.ID, summ.QNumbers, summ.Title, summ.Product,
       summ.LocaleID, summ.Language, summ.InfoPath from v_R_System sys
join v_FullCollectionMembership fcm on sys.ResourceID=fcm.ResourceID
join v_GS_PatchStatus ps on sys.ResourceID=ps.ResourceID
join v_ApplicableUpdatesSummary summ on ps.ID=summ.ID and ps.QNumbers=summ.QNumbers and ps.Product=summ.Product and ps.LocaleID=summ.LocaleID and ps.Title=summ.Title
where fcm.CollectionID = @CollID and ps.LastState!=105
order by sys.Name0

Where you need to remove the prompt for Name and add a prompt for CollID:
Name: CollID
Prompt text: Collection ID
Allow an empty value:
Provide a SQL statement:
begin
 if (@__filterwildcard = '')
  select CollectionID, Name from v_Collection order by Name
 else
  select CollectionID, Name from v_Collection
  WHERE CollectionID like @__filterwildcard
  order by Name
end

Thus it’s an easily matter to find all those computers that aren’t patched  !
(and now all I need is a collection containing all the servers  .)


(Modified 2004–12–14 to list and sort by computer name)

On my 2003 SMS test server I’ve run Windows Update a couple of times and it’s told me that everything is patched up as far as it can be.

Wrong  !

Both SMS (now that I’ve got the hardware inventory reporting in) and MBSA tell me that a patch for SQL 2000 SP3a hasn’t been applied.

Moto: install the SMS client on your servers and ensure that hardware inventory gets run. That way you can easily produce reports on what patches need to be applied to what servers.

I’ve just been experimenting with my test SMS setup. I’ve been wondering why no software updates (except the recent IE one) have been listed.

Silly me – I forgot that it’s the hardware inventory client that collects all that data, which was still set to the default of one week. So I’ve re-scheduled it and ran the hardware inventory locally on a couple of clients and now the requested/compliant data is all coming down  .

And a sort of answer I hope!

First thing today, the network administrator asked me if I had been downloading anything. It seems that since midday yesterday through to midnight, our internet utilisation was at or near 100%! He then says to me that there's this Network Monitor program that comes with SMS, have you looked at it?

I was puzzled. I didn't know anything about this Network Monitor program, I hadn’t seen anything to do with this during the installation of SMS nor was then a mention of this in Start —> Programs —> SMS . Well it turns out that there's this NetMon folder on the SMS CD and inside the SP1 upgrade which houses the Network Monitor installer.

First it looks like a good idea to go into Tools —> Find Routers and let it take as long as it wants to find all the routers in an organisation - It found our three this way. Or you could start capturing data (try the Play button at the top ). Once stopped, you can look at the captured data and/or perform analysis on it. And then, and only then, can you easily get it to resolve host names and store the results.

Except that it was querying our DNS server which was replying with stale information. So I instigated scavenging of our DNS data, with a configuration that works well with our DHCP settings. However time will tell (i.e. next month!) just how well it all works.

Back to Net Mon, and with the captured data you can then run an Expert over the data to get it to report on (say) the “Top Users” to find out who's hogging all the bandwidth. The only problem with it is that it won't give you real time statistics which is what our network administrator is after. Oh well.

No, nothing to do with how much bandwidth the remote client takes - but a warning instead.

It seems that copying data from the host machine to the guest OS - via the ‘external’ network adaptor, kills the machine. The whole machine. Including the host. Yes, our SMS server experienced it's first (and second) “System was unresponsive” shutdown state! .
And the second time - well I had to make sure that it wasn't just some fluke and that copying the data really did kill the machine .