Dec15

BitLocker very useful information

Very useful information about BitLocker and it is very useful if you are planning to upgrade your systems to Windows 7
How can you help protect your data from loss, theft, or hackers? The answer: BitLocker. If you’ve got information on your PC that you need to protect, you can help prevent theft or loss by using BitLocker data encryption to put a virtual lock on your files.
Improved for Windows 7 and available in the Ultimate edition, BitLocker helps keep everything from documents to passwords safer by encrypting the entire drive that Windows and your data reside on. Once BitLocker is turned on, any file you save on that drive is encrypted automatically.
BitLocker To Go—a new feature of Windows 7—gives the lockdown treatment to easily-misplaced portable storage devices like USB flash drives and external hard drives.
Picture of BitLocker
BitLocker locks down all your drives, so your data is safe from prying eyes.

http://www.petri.co.il/bitlocker-in-windows-7.htm

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Dec15

Creating OSD USB deployment media in System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 fails with "The parameter is incorrect"



Creating OSD USB deployment media in System Center Configuration Manager 2007 fails with “The parameter is incorrect” 


Hotfix available for download here – http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3BEN-US%3B2471018

Symptoms
When trying to create Stand-alone media, Bootable media, or Capture media on a USB Flash drive via the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (ConfigMgr 2007) console, the Task Sequence Media Wizard fails with the following message:
Error creating media. Error message is: The parameter is incorrect.. Please refer to CreateTSMedia.log to get details.
Inspecting the CreateTsMedia.log shows the following errors:
Beginning media generation CreateTsMedia
Failed to create media (0×80070057) CreateTsMedia
CreateTsMedia failed with error 0×80070057, details=”" CreateTsMedia
Creating the USB media in a ConfigMgr 2007 console running on other PCs may be successful and may not reproduce the problem.

CAUSE
The problem is a known issue with ConfigMgr 2007 SP2 and older, including R2 and R3, when the following conditions exist on the PC running the ConfigMgr 2007 console:

  1. A mapped network drive exists on the PC
  2. The PC’s hard drive has a partition with no drive letter attached to it

Condition #2 above is very common in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 since the default installation of Windows 7 creates the boot partition as a ”hidden” system partition with no drive letter attached to it. It is also a common configuration on PCs that have been encrypted with BitLocker. For this reason the issue is seen most often on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and PCs that have drives encrypted with BitLocker.

RESOLUTION
To work around the problem, take one of the following two actions before trying to create the USB media via the ConfigMgr 2007 console:
1. Temporarily disconnect mapped network drives.
or
2. Via the Computer Management console, temporarily assign a drive letter to the “hidden” partition.
Only one of the above two actions needs to be taken. Both do not need to be taken.
Once the USB media has been created, mapped network drives can be reconnected and/or the assigned drive letter can be removed from the previously hidden partition.

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Dec08

eMail Notification Script for SCCM web reports

I would like to get a customized eMail notifications for the SCCM web reports which I am interested. Below is the simple script we can use to get eMail alerts in regular intervals.

Note ==> Need to create a scheduled task to run this script if you need the output of the SCCM report regularly or in a specific interval.

<Make necessary changes as per environment and try this in LAB environment before implementing this on Production>

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
Set objStream = Createobject(“ADODB.Stream”)
Set xmlhttp = CreateObject(“Microsoft.XmlHttp”)

url=”ENTER THE URL OF THE REPORT”
htmlReport=”EXACT PATH WHERE YOU NEED TO STORE THE HTML REPORT”

xmlhttp.open “Post”, url, False
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader “Content-Type”, “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”

xmlhttp.send “print=yes”

objStream.type = 1
objStream.open
objStream.Write xmlhttp.responseBody
objStream.savetofile htmlReport, 2
objStream.Close

Set objMessage = CreateObject(“CDO.Message”)
objMessage.Subject = “Sites by hierarchy with time of last site status update”
objMessage.From = “noreply@domainname.com”
objMessage.To = “PUT THE EMAIL ADDRESS OF THE RECEIPT”
‘objMessage.Cc = “<>”
objMessage.CreateMHTMLBody “EXACT PATH WHERE YOU NEED TO STORE THE HTML REPORT”
objMessage.Configuration.Fields.Item(“http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusing”) = 2
‘Name or IP of Remote SMTP Server
objMessage.Configuration.Fields.Item(“http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserver”) = “SMTP SERVER NAME”
‘Server port (typically 25)
objMessage.Configuration.Fields.Item(“http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserverport”) = 25
objMessage.Configuration.Fields.Update
objMessage.Send
Set objMessage=Nothing
Set WshShell = Nothing
Set xmlHttp= Nothing
WScript.Echo “Script Execution Finished”

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Dec06

Reporting of "Maintenance Tasks" status of SCCM primary server

Many times we need to know the status of maintenance tasks running on SCCM primary servers as part of troubleshooting. To maintain, a healthy SCCM environment the maintenance tasks are very important.

Completion Status 0 means the task finished successfully. There is a table called SQLTaskStatus which holds this data. We can also add a column to find the time a task took to run. The query for the same would be:

select *,
floor(DATEDIFF(ss,laststarttime,lastcompletiontime)/3600) as Hours,
floor(DATEDIFF(ss,laststarttime,lastcompletiontime)/60)- floor(DATEDIFF(ss,laststarttime,lastcompletiontime)/3600)*60 as Minutes,
floor(DATEDIFF(ss,laststarttime,lastcompletiontime))- floor(DATEDIFF(ss,laststarttime,lastcompletiontime)/60)*60 as TotalSeconds
from SQLTaskStatus

Output of the Query is given below:
===================================

Origin of the Query

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