NINet.org

One of my users was complaining of “slow vm performance over the network”, so I requested a few simple diags including a traceroute from his machine to the vm instead I got a traceroute from the VM to the VM. So I decided that clearly I was asking too much from the user and threw the following batch file together (I may rewrite it in powershell for fun later).

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After a mass of updates to the code a new version is out, this is still experimental so should only be used in a lab environment.

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This little gem I wrote will listen to all interfaces on a computer for CDP packets. Once it has looped all the interfaces any packets it has captured are processed and added to WMI.

Using the attached SMS_DEF.mof we can extract that information and place it in SCCM. Anyone who knows what CDP is will see the benefit immediately. For the rest; CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol), Cisco devices send out CDP packets every 60seconds each packet contains information about the port it was sent from and the sender. In a nutshell if my computer receives a packet then I can tell which switch I am connected to, what port on that switch and a few other bits and bobs about the switch. e.g. In a test environment I have a Cisco switch which connects to a Cisco IP phone which then connects to my computer, when exe runs I get two entries in WMI, one for the phone and one for the Switch.

The use case is that helpdesk  may not know where a user is physically or where they are connected to the network and the user may be experiencing network issues, this would allow a helpdesk tech to locate the switchport  the user is connected to and pass that info to the network team for troubleshooting saving both parties the hassle of tracing cables and also allowing reporting on where a user is plugging in over a period of time.

There is still a bit to be done for this but it does generally work.

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I have tweaked my powershell script for the SCCM Dell/HP tags due to popular demand so that it can be run on a single machine using a list of service tags as the source and then will output to a CSV file. The source CSV can have any number of columns however it MUST have the following three for the script to work “Name,Vendor,Tag” in its default state. You also need to edit the $infile & $outfile variables as required.

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Updated: 2011-08-18

This is the next evolution in the warranty info fight, Dell keep changing their site which is rather frustrating. I have re-written the Warranty Info Scripts in powershell as in my opinion the code is a lot cleaner and more manageable, I’ve tweaked the MOF edit required to read this.

One major change to the script is that I have added support for HP systems, now I must stress I only have one or two of these, both are out of warranty and only had base warranties so something may have been missed / may not work as expected. You can either fix it and let me know the changes you make or let me know, via the contact page, the tag of one of your systems and I will look at it when I get a chance.

If you use any other version of the script from my site you will need to update sms.mof as the reports have changed.

I am quite shameless so if you find this useful feel free to click on donate and well, donate. :D

What info do you get?

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A quick Report to return all of the computers, the OU they are in and the last time they had  a Hardware scan.

First we create a temporary table to hold the 1st pass results, then we query that table looking for the longest OU for each computer ( this way we only get 1 record per computer returned, otherwise each level of the OU a computer is a member of will be returned)

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This is just a quick one, if you have dell machines (not sure if other manufacturers do it) but one of the BIOS options is ASSET TAG. Now this does not, as you would expect, appear in Win32_BIOS, instead it appears under Win32_SystemEnclosure.

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Those of us that installed FEP 2010 are no doubt annoyed that we cannot see the details of the queries used by SCCM to populate the FEP created collections.

The following will require acess to the SQL instance that SCCM uses as the querys are to be executed driectly on that instance.

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It’s been a while since I posted anything, but I’ve been really busy at home and in work.

Although I have beening using OSD for a while it hasn’t been completely automated, things like timezone, keyboard locale etc still need to be changed by an administrator after a rebuild. Now we have sites in America, UK, Europe and Japan, so I need to account for them in my task sequence. I will admit here that I had a bit of trouble with getting the script to work so I did get some help from MS (they added 2 lines of code to the script and 1 task sequence event).

There are 2 parts to this, 1st is the vbscript to detect and set the location and then some task sequence events to act on the variables we set.

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When I was building our SCCM environment I decided it would be a good time to clean up WSUS & FCS and bring them under the new system.

The problem I ran into was “How do I repoint FCS?” without having to uninstall and reinstall it on every machine.

The solution, a bit of VB script based on the information here: http://blogs.technet.com/fcsnerds/archive/2008/11/12/changing-the-management-group-to-which-an-fcs-client-reports.aspx

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