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ConfigMgr 2012 – Query for Notification Settings

ConfigMgr 2012 – Query for Notification Settings

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(Originally posted 12/16/2013. Reposting for reference) A situation developed recently where a client help desk was being hammered with calls during a rollout from users who were seeing the system tray popup notifications telling them that a new application was available from ConfigMgr.  As this behavior was not expected (end user notifications being considered very disruptive), the question became which applications were generating this prompt.  Against calls to disable ALL notifications for new software in the Client Settings policy, we instead…

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ConfigMgr 2012 – Cache Management Surprise

ConfigMgr 2012 – Cache Management Surprise

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(Originally posted 11/27/2013. Reposting for reference) With disk space being relatively inexpensive these days, limiting the local ConfigMgr cache to 5GB by default seems almost stingy. However, since very few circumstances require one to set content to persist in the local cache, the assumption is that ConfigMgr will do its usual good work in purging out older content to make room for new should the cache bump up against that limit.  As it turns out though, the client behavior can…

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ConfigMgr 2012 Migration – Missing Shared Distribution Points

ConfigMgr 2012 Migration – Missing Shared Distribution Points

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(Originally posted 10/1/2013. Reposting for reference) Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager includes built-in migration tools, and one of the key features of the migration tools is the ability to use Shared Distribution Points.  This allows for a smoother transition between environments by allowing the new ConfigMgr 2012 site to use existing Distribution Points in the old site (ConfigMgr 2012 or SCCM 2007) as content locations while clients in the old site continue to function normally.  Moreover, once the clients…

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Restoring the SMSDP Variable in ConfigMgr 2012

Restoring the SMSDP Variable in ConfigMgr 2012

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(Originally posted 10/15/2013. Reposted for reference) A recent ConfigMgr migration project turned up an environment variable that has been around since the SMS days but has recently fallen out of favor.  That variable is SMSDP, which is intended to provide reference to the Distribution Point providing content for a Task Sequence execution.  Following the aforementioned migration, the functions that had been leveraging this variable in the Task Sequence (in this case, it was being used to determine which CustomSettings.ini file…

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ConfigMgr 2012 WSUS Synchronization Errors

ConfigMgr 2012 WSUS Synchronization Errors

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(Reposted for reference) One particularly hot topic at the Midwest Management Summit 2014 conference last month was a relatively recent but increasingly frequent issue that was called out by Kent Agerlund in his blog post “House of Cards – The ConfigMgr Software Update Point and WSUS” (referred to all week as “the house of cards post”). This issue seemed to be popping up more and more in the community, but I had yet to see it with any of my…

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Matching ConfigMgr Software Updates to a Deployment Package with PowerShell

Matching ConfigMgr Software Updates to a Deployment Package with PowerShell

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The content side of Software Updates in ConfigMgr can be a bit confusing. Unlike Packages and Applications, in which the entirety of the content is downloaded to the local cache, when the client downloads Software Updates it only downloads the individual update.  As such, the Deployment Package is nothing more than a means of getting groups of individual updates out onto the Distribution Points to make them available for download.  The Deployment Packages are created independently of the Software Update Groups though,…

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New Blog Site!

New Blog Site!

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Due to some issues with my myITforum.com blog, including losing almost two years worth of posts, I’ve decided to bring up a new blog.  Fortunately, I have nearly all the posts I’ve lost cached in WebStory, so I’ll be going back through and re-publishing the ones that I feel may still hold some relevant content.  Cheers!

Running 64-bit PowerShell Scripts in the ConfigMgr 2012 Environment

Running 64-bit PowerShell Scripts in the ConfigMgr 2012 Environment

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(Reposted for reference) Ran into this issue recently and wanted to document it in case anyone else ran across the same problem. Scenario: I have set up a ConfigMgr 2012 Task Sequence to deploy Windows Server 2012 R2 and I want to customize the server with some Roles and Features after the OS comes down.  I have created a PowerShell script (including some basic logging) to add some of the ConfigMgr DP prereqs… …and I’ve created a legacy Package and Program to…

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