All posts by Barry Mercer

Stuff

SCCM SP2 Client Collection

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Looking for a way of deploying and updating the SCCM SP2 client to old clients? Well, here is the collection I’ve been using. This will list all the clients that are not running Service Pack 2.

select SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceID, SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceType, SMS_R_SYSTEM.Name, SMS_R_SYSTEM.SMSUniqueIdentifier, SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup, SMS_R_SYSTEM.Client from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_SMS_ADVANCED_CLIENT_STATE on SMS_G_System_SMS_ADVANCED_CLIENT_STATE.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_R_System.ClientType = 1 and SMS_G_System_SMS_ADVANCED_CLIENT_STATE.Name = “CcmFramework” and SMS_G_System_SMS_ADVANCED_CLIENT_STATE.Version < “4.0.6487.2000”

Stuff

ADSL

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I’m still waiting for fibrecity to install their nice 100mb fibre to my house, so until they do I’m stuck with plain old copper. Living in a flat means that the connection speed is quite poor. Should be synced at about 16mb but alas I only get 10. Hopefully the fibre wil be good when it arrives.

In the mean time, to keep an eye on my connection I found this.

Economics, Stuff

House Prices

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It’s been quite a while since I blogged about house prices, or anything to do with the economy at all really. Mostly because not much seems to be happening. Government prints some money, nothing much moves anywhere, least of all house prices which hae remained pretty much stable the alst few months. An odd rise here, and odd drop there but not a lot. Until that is, the Halifx’s latest report indicated a 3.6% drop in asking prices for September. Now, I know these are asking prices and I know it’s a monthly change but this is a pretty awful statistic.  The quaterly change incidentally is 0.9%, which is not as awful. I suppose the next few months will be telling. The annual change is now +2.6%, which isn’t great considering inflation is something higher than that!

IT

2008 R2 svchost fun / crashing

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Our citrix farm has been displaying interesting performance recently. We’ve deployed xen app on to new servers that sit on an ESX farm. We’ve been having huge issues with random services crashing for no reason, affecting most of the servers. Error messages below are the appropriate ones.

The Windows Management Instrumentation service terminated unexpectedly

The Shell Hardware Detection service terminated unexpectedly.

The User Profile Service service terminated unexpectedly.

The Application Information service terminated unexpectedly

The Application Experience service terminated unexpectedly.

Faulting application name: svchost.exe, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bc3c1
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16559, time stamp: 0x4ba9b802
Exception code: 0xc000071f
Fault offset: 0x000000000006e51c
Faulting process id: 0x1f3c
Faulting application start time: 0x01cb612b72787ca8
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: 3d10f918-cd20-11df-a871-005056b14de0

Faulting application name: svchost.exe, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bc3c1Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16559, time stamp: 0x4ba9b802Exception code: 0xc000071fFault offset: 0x000000000006e51cFaulting process id: 0x1f3cFaulting application start time: 0x01cb612b72787ca8Faulting application path: C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exeFaulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dllReport Id: 3d10f918-cd20-11df-a871-005056b14de0

Anyway, this appears to be casued by a bug in the WMI service, that MS have provide a (scolding) hot-fix that is located here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982293

Hopefully this will be of use to someone! Took a long time for me to find!

Stuff

IAS, 802.1X and Cisco

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This took me hours to fix. I’m so utterly annoyed at myself for not finding the problem out earlier, that I’m going to let you in on what I did.

We have a set up at work of about 100 cisco routers, aironets and other 802.1x devices connecting to a Windows 2008 IAS box for AD RADIUS authentication. Now, this one user was having a problem with them. IAS logs are, as I’m sure you’re aware, impossible to read. I could see something happening in the logs, but the aironet said Station [mac] Authentication failed. Hmm. AD security logs showed he authenticated ok. It took a long time for Windows to give up authenticating, so seemed like a network related issue. This guy was ok at home with his wireless so the laptop was ok. Weird.

Anyway, after a long and hard struggle of no errors being logged, I looked at his “dial-in” tab in AD and lo and behold, it was set to “deny”. Thanks to whomever set his account up, that was a great help. To make it better, that tab doesn’t show in my Win7 RSAT so I had to RDP to a 2k3 box.