Posts made by bbigford

@scottalanmiller Time. I know that is no excuse but the other admin and I honestly haven't had the time to set aside standing up a new box and migrating the VMs. I'm hoping I can get to it over spring break as the holiday break is completely backed up with other tasks. I don't typically agree with bandaids by any means, but this one has a pretty clear end in sight.

@brianlittlejohn I just tried it this morning. Free version allows only 1 host, and does not allow for RDP.

For keeping every Hyper-V server in a single pane of glass, the built in Hyper-V Manager is great. But if you have a 2008 host and 2012 host where we haven't upgraded versions yet, you can't load a 2008 host on a 2012 box and manage it, and vise versa. I've checked around for some free options to fill the gap till the OS is upgraded but have come up empty handed. Is anyone using a free 3rd party for this? We have around a dozen hosts, up around 50 VMs.

I've been trying to setup System Center Operations Manager 2012 and I can't get the disk alerts setup. I found this article link text and it shows something that I'm not seeing. The logical disk in availability is missing. I thought maybe it's a management pack that I'm missing but I can't see it anywhere in the list. What am I missing?

SCDPM is never going to give me a break. Replica inconsistencies and Recovery Point Failures galore. It'll be fine for a few days then I have to tweak something to get it working again. I have a new one this time... Exchange 2013. We have 3 mailboxes being backed up and 1 is having an issue. This is not a DAG so the eseutil is running against both the logs and databases. DAG is coming Q2 next year. I've copied the ese.dll and eseutil.exe from the Exchange server to the DPM server located in C:...\dpm\bin and is the right version. There are no other Exchange servers being backed up on this box. Two of three databases backup fine. Everything was working until yesterday. The disk allocation has been manually grown, but is set to automatically grow. All services are running fine. I've made sure there are no conflicting backup schedules. I've made sure to install this rollup. I've made sure this C++ redistributable Visio Update is installed. Per the picture, that highlighted updated was said to be problematic and needs uninstalled... Until the highlighted hotfix came out, then it was verified working so no point in uninstalling those just to turn around and install them again.

It was indeed the firewall. Simple enough I guess... thanks for the quick reply, Scott. Man, I'm glad you brought me over to Mango. Super fast responses.

@scottalanmiller Yeah local host is all good.

@scottalanmiller said:

For step four....

The DNS entry is an A record, not a shortcup (CNAME.) You'll want your internally desired name to point to the IP Address of the install address.

Ah, so they weren't talking about using an alias. They were just talking about simply adding it to DNS is all?

@scottalanmiller on the local host, the IP does indeed take me to the landing page. Suspected the firewall to be an issue, its managed so I'm moving and gpupdating it now to disable/test.

Hey everyone,

I've setup Spiceworks before, and now I'm setting it up again, but with trouble accessing it from other workstations. I have the installation out on a VM, port 80 wasn't being used so I left it as default 80/443. I changed the email URL in settings to http://help/portal. The only thing left was to put in a DNS entry but I can't remember for the life of me what I did on that portion because a CNAME of help/portal obviously doesn't work for the generated FQDN, and I didn't think I put in an A record. Any thoughts? I only need this to be used internally, so I'd rather not setup IIS. I checked this how-to but step 4 (the step I'm missing) has zero substance.

@Reid-Cooper said:

Maybe the more meaningful question is.... which games can't be run on it?

Minecraft. It isn't powerful enough to run Minecraft.

So I've used SCCM, WDS, and FOG in the past. Recently I left a network (where we used SCCM) to move on to where I am now as a sysadmin. My sysadmin co-worker also left, and became the director at a school district. In his environment, there was nothing, and we both agreed that his scale (about around 800-1200 machines) that FOG would work just fine as he isn't reimaging them a lot (maybe 20 or so a month). In my environment, I chose to setup WDS as we're scaling but not at a crazy rate (we have a lot less machines than the school district, but I figured why not). I setup a SCCM proof of concept over a couple days (per management's request), but I chose not to continue with it because our scale is WAY under its capabilities and showed management side by side the differences in overhead. So even though we're already paying and using System Center for other services (SCOM/DPM), it's too much administrative overhead to take SCCM seriously.

TL; DR= Why are you using WDS or FOG over the other, other than shear preference? I've saw both scale pretty darn well up to a couple thousand machines, and both are efficient in multicasting IME.

@coliver said:

I'm really interested to see what you have to say. I am really tempted to pick up the Link and Steam controller next month. I may hold off though if this works well.

I'm very curious to see how the Link goes. Obviously not a replacement for the PC which is already purchased, merely an addition to social gaming when you have friends/family over.

This is assuming we're supporting offices that buy from a big box store, full of bloatware then...

I always uninstall. But, if given the option for offices, I keep a clone of the (hopefully) like-PCs on hand and that clone is of a fresh base install. 45 minutes and done.

Seeing that it is at the VERY bottom of the page, instead of persistent (resulting in more scrolling), I think it's okay. If an advertiser wanted more real estate that is persistent, obviously the blank sides would be the best way to go.

@scottalanmiller said:

I have not had a NEW desktop in well over a desktop

Guessing you meant decade, haha. Not a bad build! I'm very curious to see how the controllers hold up. Reviewers were complaining that the concave shape made it awkward instead of filling your palms like an Xbox controller, feeling very "light and hollow", andbeing pressed into using the iconic D-pads falling a little short, making the experience a little off-putting since you can't use dual sticks (great for FPS game obviously when going sideways/diagonal). Preference though, of course.

Wow, I'll have to give Vbox another shot.

@nadnerB said:

That way you actually have to Delete the device from SCCM to allow the image to be deployed to the machine.

I've been looking for the GUID entries in SCCM 2012 but have been unable to find them. When a machine is reimaged by SCCM, I was under the impression that it does indeed log the machines entry in SCCM. Google has evaded me... do you know where they get stored at in 2012?

Interesting note while learning more about SCCM... you do indeed choose the Deploy option. I know in 2007 there was (still is with 2012?) a configurable option of Run Selected Programs in the Control Panel on the client. Effectively being able to reimage a workstation from the GUI instead of PXE. Instead of choosing Distribute for the task, you still choose Deploy. I thought by choose All Systems > Configuration Clients, boot media, PXE that it would (for the clients) put it in the list. It essentially put it in the Software Center list instead (noooo... don't prompt for that!). I should have only chose boot media, PXE (you can't JUST choose PXE... though you can choose hidden), for it to only show upon a successful PXE boot. Anyway, once I stopped the deployment. There was no two ways around it. I have to wait for users to log off/reboot. But since it didn't drag down the entire file (users can only see 1MB for the file size) and cache the package, I break the connection and it just drops off. Case closed I guess. Long afternoon.

@scottalanmiller said:

I'm afraid that SCCM is outside of my ken.

Just out of curiosity, what do you use for deployment then? Something like WDS or FOG, or something entirely different?