SCCM / ConfigMgr, WDAC, OSD and the occasional trauma dump.
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Setting the Client Status Settings for Client Activity based on AD logon
SCCM will mark a computer inactive if none of the activity checks happen Client policy request Heartbeat discovery Hardware Inventory Software Inventory Status messages sent See technet The default settings are 7 days for each of these settings which can be fine for a lot of businesses. If there are many devices that don’t often…
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Monitoring your fleets event logs – Part 2
Install Splunk – It’s free! https://www.splunk.com/en_us/download/splunk-enterprise.html Modify Program Files\Splunk\etc\system\local\inputs.conf Add the lines [WinEventLog] evt_resolve_ad_obj = 1 Then we need to reboot splunk, in Splunk click Settings, then Server controls and click Restart Splunk Next we need to add our data source, click Add Data from the launch screen, then monitor Choose Local Events then ForwardedEvents and…
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Monitoring your fleets event logs – Part 1
Windows has an amazing feature that let’s you collect logs from remote computers, it’s called Windows Event forwarding and is pretty easy to set up. Once we have this data we can use free tools such as Splunk or GrayLog to analyse the data, find patterns, fix. Below is the way to get started collecting…
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SCCM Component Manager
SCCM Component manager is a quick way to start/stop/pause SCCM components that you would normally control using the Service Manager. The reason the Service manager is so slow is because it has to connect to every site system’s registry and gather information. SCCM Component manager only connects to the server that you select so…
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The certificate you specified is already in use. Are you sure you want to use this certificate?
The whole point of this message is to say Warning: if you block this certificate tomorrow, you are going to break other things When creating bootable media or modifying a distribution point you will get this error if you use the same exportable certificate more than once. The cert is used for management point…
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Managing Automatic Deployment rules when you don’t live in the USA
Update: Starting with SCCM 1802 Automatic deployment rules can be scheduled to evaluate offset from a base day. Meaning, if patch Tuesday actually falls on Wednesday for you, the evaluation schedule can be set for the second Tuesday of the month offset by one day. …
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Disabling Windows File Explorer banner advertising
Microsoft has soo much advertising power with Windows 10, they can now put banners up in Windows Explorer via updates. You may see one such as this: ‘Save your documents and photos to OneDrive’ or ‘Get the best deal on your cloud storage with OneDrive’ The setting is called Show Sync Provider Notifications however it has…
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Creating Alerts for High-Risk Deployments
When you want to deploy Operating Systems zero-touch it can be scary the thought of all systems being added to the collection, so you can it’s best to provide as many safe-guards. We currently have a runbook that adds a variable to let the computer go zero-touch however we want to know if there is an…
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Stopping the ‘Download language typing features’ Action Centre Alert
We have deployed quite a few keyboards / Language Features however if you are missing any related features for a language this action centre prompt will keep coming up until they are installed, what’s worse is that they require admin rights to install. To deploy a fix you need to work out what’s missing. The…
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Set the computer name using the BIOS Asset Tag
If you are setting the Asset Tag the same name that the computer is, it makes sense to only have to input it once. I created a powershell script that will do the following: If VM or Mac: Exit 0 If computer exists in SCCM: Exit 0 If AssetTag Exists/Not empty: Set OSDComputerName to AssetTag,…