SCCM Push Install without being Domain Admin

What I did was put the SCCM site server in the local administrators of the client PC. This seemed to allow the client account to work.

A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client

In testing RDWeb access to the Windows Remote Desktop Services system, I had a user who could not load the page with the desktop pools icon.

I found the following message on the web server:
A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client


Solution:
SOLUTION
1. Explore to the directory that WebAdmin is installed.
2. Open web.config in NotePad.
3. Add the line: ' inside the ' section as shown below.

[system.web]
'[pages validateRequest="false" /]'


4. Save the file and exit.
5. Try to access WebAdmin again.

SMS Collections based on Organizational Units in AD

I want to create SMS Collections based on Organizational Units. However, when I go to "System Resource", our SMS 2003 site database does not have data for the "System Group Name", "System Container Name", and "System OU Name."

Discovered that the [Active directory system GROUP] discovery populates these values. Turned in on today and "bam"!, there they were!

Windows 2003 Server Time Synchronization

Several of the client Windows XP machines are out of synch in regards to the system time. Even the windows servers were out of synch with themselves. To resolve the problem, I needed to use w32tm utility to set the time, not the "net time" command.


A note from http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservergen/thread/db179f69-2a9a-40d9-88de-2b370f7dc863 was helpful, stating that " the “Net Time” command is supposed to work for Windows 2000 based machines. It uses the protocol called Simple Network Time Protocol or SNTP which means it’s a “simple” version of NTP and lacks some of the more complex algorithms which provide more accurate and stable time for NTP clients. For Windows Server 2003 / Windows XP or above machines, they use NTP instead of SNTP. "


The following two commands actually synched the time:

w32tm /config /syncfromflags:manual /manualpeerlist:"clock list"
w32tm /config /update

Modifying WIM image

I needed to change the background that is present when the Windows is starting. I could change it from within Windows, but not from the WIM image I created. It has to be simple!!!

Well, it was.....

The System Default Profile
When Windows NT is running on a computer that no user is logged on to, a dialog box appears, prompting you to press CTRL+ALT+DEL to log on. This dialog box and other aspects of the Windows NT environment at this point, such as the screen's background color and its use of wallpaper and screen savers, are controlled by the system default profile. The settings for this profile are stored in System32\config\default.

Group policies not updating on XP clients

The Active Directory servers are outside of the firewall. All the systems that are behind the firewall are not updating with AD group policies. They are giving the following error:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Userenv
Event ID: 1054

Description:
Windows cannot obtain the domain controller name for your computer network. (An unexpected network error occurred. ). Group Policy processing aborted.

ContentAvailable ignoring update with no DPs for content request

I received this message "ContentAvailable ignoring update with no DPs for content request" from SMS 2003 client systems that were behind a firewall, using private addresses, such as 172.35.0.0. These systems were on the public side, but was changed a few months ago.

Simply solved the problem by putting the private subnet in the boundry for our SMS Site server. Everything is fine now.

Windows Media Server - server-side playlists

I want to have videos playing full shows and clips when user connects, playing at different times throughout the day.

Ran accross the usage of "server-side playlists". Will see how it is done and post here.

ADMT - only installs on Server

Okay, why didn't I know that ADMT only installs on the Windows Server OS? I need to used ADMT in an environment where we have client PC located behind a firewall. Obviously, the AD servers ouside of the firewall cannot reach PCs behind the firewall, so I decided to take my laptop (running Win7) behind the firewall and install ADMT.

Needless to say, ADMT would not install on XP or Win7, but must be installed on Server. So, I am installing MS Virtual PC with a Server2003 instance, but do not plan to make it a AD server. We will see how it goes....

OST Syncronization problems

It appears that when the Outlook 2007 client does a "send/receive", it also synchronizes the Exchange Mail box with the OST-Offline Folders.

We have one user that has a 2GB *.ost. She connects to the chair's mailbox, of which contains about 5GB of data. Hence, at 2GB *.ost.

She is having trouble synching calender entries she created to his calendar. I believe it is because the size is so large, the ost file is corrupting.

There is no way to natively view the ost (it is not a pst), unless you use some third party application.

The fun for today....

SMS 2003 Schema - older version of sms schema extensions

For some reason, automatic site discovery is not working in our sms environment. I also noticed that "older version of the sms schema extensions" is being logged in the sitecomp.log.

1) I need to setup a SLP (Server Locator Point) in SMS Admin. Actually, I had already done it, but it still was not working.

2) I needed to extend the AD schema with SMS schema extensions. I thought I had done this, but it appears that I haven't. Actually, because I have installed SP3, apparently, I need to run the schema extender app for SP3, as new classes\attributes are created.

Unpack SP3 for SMS 2003 and check out:

\SMS2003SP2\smssetup\bin\i386 for extadsch.exe

Exchange 2003 Server crash...

On Monday, our Exchange 2003 server had a hard crash, which caused corruption of our (4)four datastores. Needless to say, I have not had this much trouble with Exchange in a while. After much research, I basically did the following:

1. Renamed the datastore directories and deleted the corrupted datastores after backing them up to another drive (took 4 hours to backup over 1MB link – upgraded it to 1GB while the system was down). Went into the Exchange Admin console and created new blank datastores.
2. Restored the four datastores from Friday’s (March 5th) online backup – (after 1GB link set, it took only 2hrs for 125GB of datastores).
3. Ran: Eseutil /r E00 /l “y:\mdbdata\Exchangelogs” /s “y:\mdbdata\Exchangelogs”
4. Ran: “eseutil /g” on each datastore
5. Ran: “eseutil /p” to each to repair each datastores, (took about 1 hour each), which allowed me to finally mount them.

When I ran the “eseutil” commands above, the E00.log was the one that was created when I generated new databases to do the restore, not the one on the system had when it crashed. However, I have the transaction logs from Friday 5th-8th that I think I want to replay, if it won’t cause harm, because some users are missing emails from the period between Friday Mar 5th and when the system crashed on Monday evening.

My Question is (two-part):
A. Do you know if one can replay older transaction logs using “eseutil” on a currently running Exchange server?
B. If I can, do you know if I can replay the logs while the server is online, or do I have to stop the datastores, then run the command?

Creating a custom WinPE for WIM install

We use static ips here and since SMS OSD Install Image CD will only use dhcp, I've decided to create a custom WinPE that will format the primary drive, set a static IP, and connect to our SMS server and apply our standard pc image "wim" file. Modified the Startnet.cmd, created a diskpart script file, and used the windows AIK for the winpe image.

The technet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709665(WS.10).aspx has been my guide.
I'll let you know how it goes.....

Unable to obtain Terminal Server User Configuration. Error: The RPC server is unavailable

I had to changed my private 1GB iSCSI network port on my SMS 2003 box, to the front side. Tried to use terminal services to get to the box and received "Unable to obtain Terminal Server User Configuration. The RPC server is unavailable".

Also, I noticed that I could not map a drive to the box.

After looking at some posts, I realized that I had not enabled "File and Print Services" and "Client for Microsoft Networks". Enabled these, and things were working again.

These settings had been disabled originally because I did not need them for iSCSI traffic talking to our storage.