philipnet

I’m having a lovely time here with MOM .

I’ve just been looking at the MBSA scanner. Not only do you have to create the web share on a server and configure MOM to use that, under Windows 2003 you have to specifically disable Windows Authentication or else the clients won’t be able to connect .

As it is, we don’t have a policy for patching servers so there is little to no point in actually running the scans – so I’ve disabled them.

There’s a MOM 2005 Management Pack for SMS 2003: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=99834c12-fb4d-4174-a727-926d358ca593.
And there’s a MOM 2005 Management Pack for Dell PowerEdge servers: http://support.euro.dell.com/uk/en/filelib/index.aspx?sid=PWE_PNT_XEO_1600SC&cat=0&os=WNET&dev=5934&devlib=36&fileid=R98393&file=127527.

Over the last few days I have been reposting most of my blogs that were on sms2003.com on to my windowsadvice.com blog. Now whilst the information is still accessible on the old server, I’ve totally lost any ability to manage, organise or amend them.

So I asked Steve (who setup sms2003.com) if he could send me a dump from the database of all my blogs, and he did. In fact he send me an export of the whole database which included everyone’s blogs and all the comments (including the spam!).

The first task was to figure out what on earth I should do with this .bak file I had as an attachment in my email. I recognised the file extension from somewhere, but I couldn’t quite place what it was or what I should do with it. A bit of Googling gave me the right hint – I should try importing it into SQL Server 2000. Ah ha! I had realised where I had seen it before, so I muddled along into Enterprise Manager and tried to restore the database.

Except that it kept failing. It took a bit more Googling and a hunt in the Options tab to work out that I needed to modify the location of where the database was being restored to, in order for the process to work.

Now I had the data in a usable form, I needed to get the pertinent parts out of the database and into a text file. For that, I just exported the contents of the blog_Content table where ever I was the author. That did mean that I didn’t get any of the comments, but then I didn’t particularly feel the need to move them across.

One thing to note, SQL stores the " character as two " characters. So I substituted the two "s for one in the exported text. Then, for almost every entry in the export, I cut and pasted the title and code content into BlogJet, tidied up the formatting, checked the spelling and made the occasional grammatical change before uploading it to windowsadvice.com . Then using the admin console in Community Server I pasted in the date and time the post was originally made.

I’ve taken the plunge and downloaded and installed the evaluation version of AdminStudio . What convinced me to do this was of the good experience I’ve had with AdminStudio SMS Edition , and in particular the repackager component. But I now Read More...

I’ve been working on packaging a few work related software packages recently (more on those trials later). But I’ve just had a thought that wouldn’t it be nice if one could create administrative installation points for MSI files at a click of a button, rather than resorting to the command line or Start —> Run.

Well now you can.

Announcing “Create AIP” (I have a knack for stating the obvious) which is a registry file which you run on your system. It adds an entry for MSI files so you can right click on one, choose “Create AIP” then the MSI will launch and let you specify where to create the administrative installation point  .

There are two registry files, the right one depends on which OS you are running. If you are running Windows 2000 then download Create MSI AIP 2000. If you are running Windows XP or Server 2003 then download Create MSI AIP XP2003.

The difference is due the name of the Windows installation folder. With 2000 it’s “WinNT” and with XP and later it’s “Windows”.  I would have used “%windir%” and just produced one registry file, but that resulted in “Access denied” messages when invoked  .

N.B. This only works if the MSI file supports administrative installation points in the first place. Quick tests reveal that the MSI for Paint Shop Pro 7 does, but the one for the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyser does not.

I actually meant to come back to my previous post on this subject, I just never got around to it. So I’m using the activity of reposting my previous blogs as a perfect excuse to revisit and comment on some of them . Ages ago I hinted that Active Read More...

Recently the blogs on sms2003.com have been shut down and the bloggers moved over to windowsadvice.com . For me that means I have a new audience and a new set of fellow bloggers. So I thought that I had better introduce myself, again.

My name’s Phil and I am an I.T. Technician at a Further Education college in the UK. Because of the varied ways bloggers who post about their job have been treated, I’m going to let my employer remain anonymous. In my job I am currently using SMS2003 and trailing MOM2005. I am the only one who really uses SMS, the rest of the team just use Remote Tools to look at other user’s Desktops  .

As it stands, I am looking for a new job. I feel that I’ve come to the point with my current employer that I can’t continue to grow professionally and that my skills and abilities are underutilised. I am looking to move on up into a full/proper System Administrator role and believe that I have the skills, experience and ability to be successful in this. If you want to know how this is going or just find out about me as a person, then check out my blog on my own website.

As sms2003.com has closed I will shortly be migrating my old blogs from that site to this one (resetting the posting date and incorporating comments as I go). There will be a subsequent blog on the issues I encountered and how I overcame them.