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2018

FieldnotesOpsMgrMicrosoftOpsMgr 1801OpsMgr 1807

Upgrading #OpsMgr 1801 to 1807 - Fieldnotes

My Fieldnotes are quick, unrefined notations and reflections from the field. Content may be obvious and unnecessary to some, useful to others.The main purpose is for them to be used as a searchable notebook.These Notes are not to be seen as a manual, a how-to or a set ofinstructions, but rather a collection of thoughts, reflectionsand experiences from my field-work. Abstract Upgrades from OpsMgr (SCOM) 1801 to 1807 is generally a safe operation. Can be done using Windows Update if you want to, but I would suggest only letting Management Servers, Reporting Servers and Web Console servers pre-load the update for a controlled update at a suitable time. I general, the updates goes smooth, but you still have to run the SQL-script(s) and import the updated Management Packs provided with the update. This should be done directly after updating the last Management Server. Links Official Documentation Download Location Announcement Blog What’s New! - Webinar Recording List of fixes Notes Updating the Management Servers Fairly quick update, may need a restart afterwards. On occasion, especially if the patch has to wait on shutting down the management server services (healthservice, omsdk, cshost) due to backlogs or high load, it might fail at replacing the binaries. You will notice this as the management server will go grey in the SCOM Console and you might find connectivity errors in the OperationsManager eventlog. If this happens, can be fixed by simply applying the patch again after a reboot.

MicrosoftOpsMgr 2016

#OpsMgr 1801 Upgrade - The Fail Anthology

A Collection of OpsMgr Upgrade Fails I’ll be frank on this one; Microsoft really dropped the ball on the 1801 setup program. No upgrade or update has been this ridden with faults and obscure errors, not even the infamous SCOM 2007 SP1 setup. And this is not only errors that will abort the installation, they will actively remove your existing SCOM Components and cause a restore, either from snapshot/checkpoint or from backup. MAKE SURE YOUR BACKUPS ARE WORKING!!! Rollbacks don’t work in 1801, at all. You have been warned. Here’s my list of the issues I’ve seen and wrestled so far. .NET 3.5 Pre-requisites Although neither SCOM 2016 nor 1801 actually has a .NET 3.5 requirement, the setup think it does. The Prerequisute checker isn’t aware though, meaning it will happily try to upgrade and then fail. And, boy, does it fail spectacularly! When the upgrade failes, it’s supposed to perform a rollback, and reading the setup log it actually do try. Unfortunatly, the “rollback” will remove any existing SCOM Roles in the server. O_o Yes, thats right. Your Management Server is no longer a Management Server! Workaround Make sure all SCOM Management Servers have .NET Framework 3.5 installed before attempting an upgrade.

2017

EventsMSIgnite 2017

#MSIgnite 2017: BRK1039 - Windows Server Software Defined

BRK1039 - Windows Server Software Defined The fastest route to the benefits of hyper-converged infrastructure WinSrv 2016, “Most cloud ready OS”, “Security” etc Talking about how WS2016 makes it possible to define Network, Compute and Storage in software, as virtual machines/Applicances. WSSD Microsoft defines reference architecture, Solution vendors make and certify hardware packages, customers use and get rekommendations from Microsoft and vendors. Benefits Pre-validated Partner validated against reference architecture Time to value Up and running quickly Optimized OOB Less guesswork Tuned for the hardware solution Hardware Choice Select best match from vendors Converged Storage VMs on SMB3 on S2D on SOFS Cluster

EventsMSIgnite 2017

#MSIgnite 2017: GS01 - Microsoft for the Modern Data Estate

GS01 - Microsoft for the modern data estate Sep 25, 2:15 pm – 3:30 pm Quick Notes Massive and growing amounts of data. Companies that out-develop themselves. Some companies have learned to leverage and gain from the data, like Honeywell, DocuSign and Jet. Hybrid is the way to go. Quick hands-up: Almost no companies believe all-public is even possible Almost all see a hybrid solution is the thing. SQL 2017 GA 2017-10-02: Available on: Windows Linux Docker Kubernetes… *applause* Gives superb compatibility over many platforms and distributions. 2+ million docker pulls. Lots of focus on performance and security. has the smallest amount of vulnerabilities. Only commercial dB with AI built in. R and Python support OOB. BI included in license; web, desktop and mobile. Support for graph data and queries. Advanced machine learning with R + Python. Native TSQL scoring. Adaptive query processing and Automatic plan correction. Special pricing (30%) for SQL on Red hat Azure SQL Managed Instance Like a SQL instance on premise, in the cloud. without the server. Easy to migrate as it’s the same thing. Management using the same tools as always. SQL SA customers get discounts on Azure SQL. Other stuff Vulnerability assessment for GDPR. Intelligent insights into performance.

EventsMSIgnite 2017

#MSIgnite 2017: TK01 - Create a Modern Workplace with Microsoft 365

TK01 - Create a modern workplace with Microsoft 365 Sep 25, 10:45 am – 12:15 pm UNSTRUCTURED NOTES AWARENESS NOTICE! Also written on phone, will come back and refine Arrived late due to escalators being bottlenecks. Something about 3d objects in office, PowerPoint. Showing a photo with mixed reality, rotating 3d-space. Office Windows Ink deleting stuff with pen, highlights etc Seems fairly intuitive. Would like to test soon. Word accessibility, colour blindness, proofing with patterns. language improvements. suggestions about better wordings. Excel

EventsMSIgnite 2017

#MSIgnite 2017: KEY01 - Vision Keynote

KEY01 - Vision Keynote Sep 25, 9:00 am – 10:00 am UNSTRUCTURED NOTES! Also, mixed Swedish and English, sorry for that. Will update at a later time O365, all in one place… Live sändning med AI översättning. What’s the actual purpose of technology, why do we do this? How can we use it to do better. how to ensure privacy while at it. how do we give the power of technology to everyone? Assume everything will be multi device. serverless computing, edge distribution, management. Empower, Engage, Optimize, Transform. Microsoft 365 (not Office). Mixed reality. Holo lens, Oasis Headsets. Holo lens cameras for presentation, on github. Notes saved with spatial information for review. Microsoft mixed reality headsets. Conversations can be replayed and reviewed in teams. Microsoft graph is extensible, for example with LinkedIn. Outlook connected LimkedIn, better searches for… everything? Bing for business, can search graph as well. Nice integration with any applications extending graph. Pairs well with machine learning and AI/Fuzzy Search to parse both data and meta data on context. Admin portal gives insight and analytics into what’s searched for further optimization. Also connects with Cortana. Business applications Dynamics 365. Also extends graph. AI First. Virtual Agent demo. App&Infra / AI Azure. Intelligent Cloud, intelligent creativity. Machine reading and comprehension. Quantum computing… ? MS seems to be trying hard to build one. VS gets tools for developing and debugging and testing qbits.

2016

MicrosoftOpsMgr 2012

Set-SCOMMaintenanceMode Deluxe ed. [#opsmgr #powershell]

Untimely, perhaps While most of us are waiting for SCOM 2016 RTM to be generally available i’ve completely forgot to blog about my little Set-SCOMMaintenanceModeDeluxe.ps1 script I wrote a while ago. It is pretty much a small extension to the regular Set-SCOMMaintenanceMode cmdlet that allows you to set Computers, Groups or specific Windows Services into maintenance mode. I have yet to make it a proper module (although I have promised myself to do so) so you’d still have to manually download the script and execute it the old-fashioned way. I’ve uploaded it as a public gist on github, so feel free to add adapt it to your needs. Here’s the gist

CodeVBS

Resize all images in a Word document with #vbs #macro

TLDR Quick and dirty macro to resize all images in a word document to 145 mm. I am lazy like that. Get the gist of it here. The “Why” Ok, so. I am a consultant, as you may know. And as a consultant, people pay me to do stuff and expect me to be efficient and deliver with high quality. Part of that entails writing documentation containing how I do stuff, where I do it and often why I do it. This documentation is expected to be detailed enough to make sure my customers will be able to follow the steps and produce a copy of my work. Most of the time these document are a big part of the disaster recovery processes and might have to be executed by the on-call staff with no previous knowledge of the product. This means screenshots. Lots of screenshots. And while templates are nice and help me out a lot, the screenshots have to be from the actual installation and not some copy-pasta from a previous assignment. To help me out, I use the excellent free program Greenshot to quickly generate screenshots into a WIP-folder (or directly into Word if that is appropriate) and that makes it possible to grab snapshots of the process without having to pause all the time to PrtScn-Alt+Tab-Ctrl+V-Crop-Ctrl+C-Alt+Tab-Ctrl+C. I simply press PrtScn and go on with the installation. Being a bit pedantic, doesn’t help me out here though as I find myself selecting and resizing all the images in the Word document I have produced. This is a very time-consuming process and not the most exact one either. I want all images to be of scaled, if necessary, to an equal maximum width that fits comfortably withing the margins of the document template my company has prepared for me. So I created a fairly simple macro to do it for me. The “How” If you are un-familiar with macros in Word, you will find them under the “View” tab. Clicking on “Macros” will give you the option to execute the ones you have, or you can create your own using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). To create one, select where you want it saved (normal.dotx in my case, as I want it readily available) and enter a name for it. This will bring up the Visual Basic for Applications IDE, where you can write your own fun stuff.

MicrosoftOpsMgr 2012

PoSH Grid Dashboard for RDSH [#opsmgr]

TLDR Customer wanted to see all RDS Host servers in a view with their current total session count. Decided to use a powershell grid dashboard, and share the script. Here’s the gist of it: SCOM_RDSH_TotalSession_PoSHWidget.ps1 How To Keeping it fairly short this time. Pre-requisites are: System Center 2012 R2 with UR2 or later Microsoft RDS Management Pack Microsoft Windows Core OS Management Pack Create a dashboard Rightclick and create a new view somewhere, make it a Dashboard View Enter Name and Description Select Grid type, and layout

Technobabble

In transit, again

We’re moving! Yep. Again. Although, it’s been a year or two since the last time. The reason(s) Ok, so I’ve using Wordpress for quite a long time now and it’s been good. Mostly. It’s a fairly solid platform and has a whole slew of feautures that work nicely. Before Wordpress I used Textpattern, a very slimmed, minimalistic authoring experience and my first contact with textile and similar markup/writing/notation languages. For those unaware, textile is not unlike markdown. Or should we say that markdown is not unlike textile? Considering that textile was invented by Dean Allen two years before markdown. Anyhow. Both work pretty much as good as the other, allowing the author to write in any text-editor, using easily readable and fairly logical formatting. Before that I used Movable Type, and prior to that either Dreamweaver or… well, notepad or vim. Problem with all of those platforms, however, is that they require dynamically generated webpages and technologies like PHP, Perl, .NET, Java and whatnot. That, in itself, has been a very minor issue until lately. Sure, it requires servers with logics, engines, add-ons, execution rights to the local filesystem etc, but still a minor nuisance. Mostly a financial nuisance really as active servers tend to cost money while finding static hosting for free is still pretty easy. Hell! I could put a webserver on a RaspberryPi and get good performance for a small-ish blog like mine if all I am using is static content. But, again. Not a major problem in itself. The main instigating factors to move away from Wordpress are the increasing size of the package, the lack of personal control, the lack of ease to extend my platform due to ever-expanding APIs and the fact that it is so popular that every “hacker” and it’s mother knows how to find exploits on it. My webhost, NFSN has been very good at detecting probing and brute-force attempts and automatically block public access to stuff like the login-pages and XML-RPC interfaces when that happens. I am just so sick and tired of having to constantly be on top of it with software updates, plugin updates, theme updates, security updates, spam-filtering, re-enabling the login page… Back to the basics Teknoglot.se will be served statically from now on, and it will be hosted for free on Github Pages. Using Hexo.io I can write my posts using markdown, then with a simple hexo generate --deploy generate and update the static files and publish them. No login pages to hack, no dynamic pages to exploit, no server security to worry about.