Zak's IT Blog

PREFACE Sorry for the lapse in posts as of late. We're gearing up for a new school year and I've been a bit busy. It turns out this blog doesn't get an amazing amount of views a day, but it gets enough for me to know that it might be helping someone. I write these posts because I've always found myself having an unique issue that most forums do not answer specifically. So most of my posts are for specific issues rather than covering a broad subject. With that said I have a batch script that I wrote today to cleanup my file server. It's very rudimentary so bear with me. INTRO In the education environment you have children that leave the system every year. It's amazing what a child in the extent of a year can rack up in terms of roaming data. We use roaming profiles and folder redirection here for the students data. So every year our servers get loaded with 10s of thousands of files. Every year I used to go through the folders and adjust permissions and

2 years ago we installed 2 MSM760 Mobility Controllers as a team across 2 locations. We have 1 SSID for employees, one for guests, and another for the IT staff. This was all installed as part of a major overhaul we did to two of our locations. This was a complete infrastructure overhaul, from the ports on the wall to the core switch. Initial Setup Controller 1 Internet Port - 192.168.10.2 SM - 255.255.255.248 Lan Port - 10.24.32.235 - 255.255.248.0 Controller 2 Internet Port - 192.168.10.3 - SM 255.255.255.248 Firewall Int 5 - 192.168.10.1 SM - 255.255.255.248 Core Switch VLAN 5 - Non routable/no IP address. Untagged for A7,A8 Which are the controller's internet port and int 5 of the firewall, respectively. It's also tagged on our interior network. vlan 1    name "DEFAULT_VLAN"    untagged A1-A6,A9-A22,B1-B8    ip address <CORE SWITCH IP>    no untagged A7-A8    ip igmp    exit vlan 5    name "GuestWireless"    untagged A7-A8    tagged

This is an issue I've had a few times and when you look around on the forums you see multiple answers. I found the right one on an obscure forum that I can't think of right now. The quick answer is this: Use the correct version of DISM to service the image . They must be in the same "generation". For Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 this version is : 6.3.9600.16384 For Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 and below this version is : 6.2.9200.16384 Background and Setup: I have a Windows Server 2012 box running System Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2. We are in the process of switching our primary OS for new systems to Windows 8.1 Enterprise x64. As I build my images the old fashioned I tend to forget a few things from time to time. In this case I built the image without installing the .NET feature. The instructions to do that are here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn482069.aspx So I'm following the instructions to get a refresher on

During a "Build and Capture" task sequence you may run into this error. I ran into this error a few times before and I always had to refer back to my older task sequences to figure it out. It's a very simple fix, but I seem to overlook it every time. You will see this in your SMSTS.log: This means that the computer is a part of a domain. You can't capture a machine if it's part of a domain. My task sequence was like this: As you can see this is a very simple task sequence. It just captures my built machine and stores it on my distribution point. I don't like the "Build and Capture" style task sequence. This way offers me far more flexibility in my opinion. It's just far less automated. To fix the issue you need to simply add a 'Join Domain or Workgroup' step before everything else. So your task sequence will look like this: The next screenshot shows a successful join to the workgoup.       The next screenshot

Today I got a call from a friend that was setting up WSUS on Windows Server 2012. He got WSUS setup but the clients were not checking in. After talking on the phone with him for a bit he told me he had not set anything up on the client side yet.  Here are the steps to setup your clients via GPO taken from  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc720539(v=ws.10).aspx In Group Policy Object Editor, expand  Computer Configuration , expand  Administrative Templates , expand  Windows Components , and then click  Windows Update . In the details pane, click  Specify Intranet Microsoft update service location . Click  Enabled  and type the HTTP(S) URL of the same WSUS server in the  Set the intranet update service for detecting updates  box and in the  Set the intranet statistics server  box. For example, type  http(s): //servername  in both boxes. Click  OK . This is great in most cases, but to my knowledge WSUS in Windows Server 2003 - 2008 R2 use port 80 as the defau

I received a support ticket today from one of our schools saying they had a strange error coming up. I asked the usual questions like did you reboot, what color is the screen, etc. She said it was the BSOD, but it looked different. After going to take a look at the machine I saw the error and I hard rebooted the machine. I came to see this error: At first thought I figured this was a memory error, but it was not. After I removed each stick of RAM one-by-one the error persisted. After a bit of Googling I ran across this article. http://www.dell.com/support/troubleshooting/bz/en/bzdhs1/KCS/KcsArticles/ArticleView?c=bz&l=en&s=dhs&docid=604790 This says it's a NIC issue and you can fix it by uninstalling the old driver and reinstalling. This, however, was not the case. The NIC was failing at POST, far too soon for a driver to be the issue. I also updated the BIOS to A07. (Was on A01) This did nothing as well. I resolved the issue by adding a NIC into the machine an

In the past posts I have explained how to create a task sequence to update / refresh computers to Windows 7 from Windows XP.  Most of the time this all works fine and I can just sit back and watch as the computers refresh themselves. Sometimes, though, that is not always the case as I will explain. Sometimes my task sequences will fail at the 'Restore User Files and Settings' group. It usually happens on laptops. From what I have seen it's because the laptops have went into hibernation, powered down, or have lost network connectivity at this step. What this means is that the State Store has been saved to the State Migration Point, but the data is encrypted and you can't really do anything with it. You have a bare metal Windows 7 install with no user data. I've read a few ways to accomplish retrieving your data from the State Store, and I'll cover them here. Use MigRecover found  here . This method did not work for me at all . I tried both versions to no a

I came in to work today to a plethora of phone calls from people saying that their computers had crashed. After digging a bit into the issue I noticed the only machines that were affected were Windows XP machines. I noticed that the MsMPEng.exe process had crashed on startup and would keep throwing errors.  I traced this down to System Center Endpoint Protection and did some digging. I found this link: http://msmvps.com/blogs/kenlin/archive/2014/04/16/winxp-and-or-win2003-with-sc-forefront-endpoint-protection-installed-msmpeng-exe-crashes-after-definition-update.aspx This shows that the latest Endpoint definition update causes an error that crashes the scanning engine of Endpoint. I disabled the update so further machines wouldn't be affected.  I made the suggested changes that the above article recommended, but on some machines the damage had already been done. My remedy for the affected machines was to uninstall SCEP, reboot the machine, and reinstall.  Since there is a

I've came across this error a couple of times now. If you're receiving this error you will see it 3-4 times in your SMSTS.log file before your task sequence will fail. Giving you a generic task sequence error. Unless you look in the SMSTS.log you will not see this error. After looking through my settings on my State Migration Point, I noticed that I had only 15 clients with Complete/In-Progress status. Well that should be fine as I have set my client max to 50. The catch is the days I had set to retain my migration data. This was set to 30 days. This is pretty high , I know. I had it set this high because the is a new rollout and I didn't want to lose anyone's data. I wanted to have plenty of time to recover it if I needed to. So even though my clients max was set to 50 and the SCCM console was only showing 15 Completed/In-progress. My Migration Point had the meta data for over 100 still stored. This was caused by me just deleting associations out of the console and

Part 2 of my post of how I made our transition to Windows 7 from XP please read my previous post or this one won't make much sense. http://zemerickit.blogspot.com/2014/04/sccm-2012-r2-windows-xp-refresh-to.html So we've created a task sequence and most of the pieces are in place for the successful deployment of Windows 7. However in my case I needed to deploy to laptops that only had WIFI access. In all the forums I read everyone says just don't do it. Well-- I'm going to do it. I have the bandwidth available and I don't want to have to touch every single computer to plug them up and image them. So my task sequence looks something like this:      The first thing I had to do was to make sure all the content I needed was downloaded to the machine prior to the task sequence starting. This is a simple option to select when you deploy the task sequence under the Distribution page (or tab) select "Download all content locally before starting task seq

As the deadline for the End of Life of Windows XP approaches I was tasked with the job to make the upgrade to Windows 7  happen in the simplest manner possible. Here is my story. My first objective was how: 1. You could make two task sequences. One to capture user data and the second to deploy the OS and restore the data. This made no sense to me so I didn't go this route. I mean there had to be a better way. 2. You could make one task sequence that captured the user data deployed the OS and restored the data all in one sequence. This is a completely unattended approach and that's the way I like it. You need a few things to get started. 1. You need Windows AIK for Windows 7 and the supplement which can be found at the following links. Windows 7 AIK http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5753 Windows 7 AIK Supplement http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5188 *Later on you'll need the Windows 8 AIK as well. The links are refer

This blog's sole purpose will be to help out someone else out there that has had the same issues that I have had in the past. There will be some tutorials, FYIs, and just vent sessions. I plan to use this for my own reference as well. Think of it of somewhat of a knowledge base. Sometimes I solve a problem and I have no where to store the information. I know someone else out there has had the same issue so why not share how I accomplished it in my situation? You will have to disregard my lack of  'grammatical awareness' as I'm quick to just type my thoughts and get the info out there rather than spend time checking if this is indeed a run-on sentence. Let's see how this goes, and if I maintain it long enough for anyone to use it. -Zak