System Center Virtual User Group meeting on November 13th

I'm going to be presenting at the upcoming System Center Virtual User Group meeting on November 13th. This will be my first User Group presentation, luckily it's virtual so they won;t be able to see me sweat.

I'll be presenting content from my recently published document covering how to deploy FCS agents with SCCM, how to maintain FCS signature updates with your existing SCCM WSUS infrastructure and monitoring FCS configurations via DCM. It'll be a brisk 30 minutes with a bunch of technical content. Hopefully brisk enough to keep me from realizing it's happening!

This should also be a good warmup for my presentation at the Jacksonville, Fl System Center Users Group on the 19th. More on that later.

Automating ConfigMgr Query Creation with Powershell

I'm currently working on implementing a fairly large System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr or SCCM depending on who you ask and the time of day) hierarchy. The hierarchy spans multiple domains on the workstation side of the house and we are targeting and tracking client deployment on a per domain basis.  With 11 domains and 4 queries per domain on 3 site servers I wanted to make my life a little easier so I spent some quality time with the ConfigMgr SDK and the PowerGui Script Editor to hack out a script to do it for me.

The script simply has 2 arrays that it iterates over, one for domains, and the other for the queries to create.  The array for the Domains is a plain vanilla list of strings.  The Array for the Queries is a bit more complex since it required more than a single piece of data per query.  I used an array of hashmaps for this.  There may be a more elegant way to handle this (an array of custom objects perhaps) but my days of perl have made me relatively comfortable with complex nested data structures. 

All of that was simple.  But issues with the Put() method on the WMI class gave me quite a bit of trouble.  Apparently, the put method occasionally fails to function for no apparent reason.  To resolve this I had to trap the exception and re-call the put method.  That worked splendidly.  After figuring out a bit more of the structure of the objects returned I was also able to spit out a nice bit of text if the creation succeeded of error out if it failed. 

One major item to note, the SDK will allow you to create duplicate queries.  So be prepared to delete some stuff if you play around with this script.  And now what you've probably been scrolling past all of this text to find...

$site = 'SMS'
$siteserver = 'SCCMServer01'

[array] $domains = @(
    'DOMA',
    'DOMB',
    'DOMC',
    'DOMD'
)

[array] $queries = @()

$queries += @{
    'Name' = '|DOMAIN| - All Workstations';
    'Expression' = 'select SMS_R_System.Name, SMS_R_System.SMSAssignedSites, SMS_R_System.IPAddresses, SMS_R_System.IPSubnets, SMS_R_System.ADSiteName, SMS_R_System.OperatingSystemNameandVersion, SMS_R_System.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup, SMS_R_System.LastLogonUserDomain, SMS_R_System.LastLogonUserName, SMS_R_System.SMSUniqueIdentifier, SMS_R_System.ResourceId, SMS_R_System.ResourceType, SMS_R_System.NetbiosName from  SMS_R_System where SMS_R_System.Client = 1 and SMS_R_System.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup = "|DOMAIN|" and SMS_R_System.OperatingSystemNameandVersion like "Microsoft Windows NT%Workstation%"';
    'TargetClassName' = 'SMS_R_System';
}
$queries += @{
    'Name' = '|DOMAIN| - All Client Workstations';
    'Expression' = 'select SMS_R_System.Name, SMS_R_System.SMSAssignedSites, SMS_R_System.IPAddresses, SMS_R_System.IPSubnets, SMS_R_System.OperatingSystemNameandVersion, SMS_R_System.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup, SMS_R_System.LastLogonUserDomain, SMS_R_System.LastLogonUserName, SMS_R_System.SMSUniqueIdentifier, SMS_R_System.ResourceId, SMS_R_System.ResourceType, SMS_R_System.NetbiosName from  SMS_R_System where SMS_R_System.OperatingSystemNameandVersion like "Microsoft Windows NT%Workstation%" and SMS_R_System.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup = "|DOMAIN|" and (SMS_R_System.Client = 1 or SMS_R_System.Client is not null )';
    'TargetClassName' = 'SMS_R_System';
}
$queries += @{
    'Name' = '|DOMAIN| - All Non-Client Workstations';
    'Expression' = 'select SMS_R_System.Name, SMS_R_System.SMSAssignedSites, SMS_R_System.IPAddresses, SMS_R_System.IPSubnets, SMS_R_System.OperatingSystemNameandVersion, SMS_R_System.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup, SMS_R_System.LastLogonUserDomain, SMS_R_System.LastLogonUserName, SMS_R_System.SMSUniqueIdentifier, SMS_R_System.ResourceId, SMS_R_System.ResourceType, SMS_R_System.NetbiosName, SMS_R_System.ADSiteName from  SMS_R_System where SMS_R_System.OperatingSystemNameandVersion like "Microsoft Windows NT%Workstation%" and SMS_R_System.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup = "|DOMAIN|" and (SMS_R_System.Client = 0 or SMS_R_System.Client is null )';
    'TargetClassName' = 'SMS_R_System';
}
$queries += @{
    'Name' = '|DOMAIN| - All Computers';
    'Expression' = 'select SMS_R_System.Name, SMS_R_System.SMSAssignedSites, SMS_R_System.IPAddresses, SMS_R_System.IPSubnets, SMS_R_System.OperatingSystemNameandVersion, SMS_R_System.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup, SMS_R_System.LastLogonUserDomain, SMS_R_System.LastLogonUserName, SMS_R_System.SMSUniqueIdentifier, SMS_R_System.ResourceId, SMS_R_System.ResourceType, SMS_R_System.NetbiosName, SMS_R_System.ADSiteName from  SMS_R_System where SMS_R_System.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup = "|DOMAIN|"';
    'TargetClassName' = 'SMS_R_System';
}

function New-SMSquery {
    Param (
        [string] $SiteServer = '.',
        [string] $Site,
        [string] $Name = $(throw "Missing required parameter (Name)"),
        [string] $Expression = $(throw "Missing required parameter (Expression)"),
        [string] $TargetClassName = 'SMS_R_System'
    )
    Process {
        trap [System.Management.Automation.RuntimeException] {
            if ($_.Exception.ErrorRecord.TargetObject -eq 'put') {
                $newquery.put()
                continue
            } else {
                break
            }
        }
        $eap = $ErrorActionPreference
        $ErrorActionPreference = 'stop'
        $QueryClass = [wmiclass]"\\$Siteserver\root\sms\site_$($Site):SMS_Query"
        $newquery = $QueryClass.CreateInstance()
        $newquery.name = [string] $Name
        $newquery.expression = [string] $Expression
        $newquery.targetclassname = [string] $TargetClassName
        $newquery.put()
        $ErrorActionPreference = $eap
        return $newquery
    }
}

foreach ($d in $domains) {
    foreach ($q in $queries) {
        $newq = new-SMSQuery -SiteServer $SiteServer -Site $Site -Name $($q.Name.Replace('|DOMAIN|',$d)) -Expression $($q.Expression.Replace('|DOMAIN|',$d)) -TargetClassName $($q.TargetClassName)
        $newq | gm
        if ($newq[0].IsInstance) {
            Write-Host "Created query: $($newq.Name) ($($newq.QueryID))"
        } else {
            Write-Error "Failed to create query $($q.Name.Replace('|DOMAIN|',$d))"
            exit
        }
    }
}

I'm officially published in Beta

Some of you may know that I've been working on some documentation for integrating MS System Center Configuration Manager and MS Forefront Client Security so that they could play nice together. Well the document has been delivered to MS and posted as a Beta on Codeplex. Assuming it doesn't turn anybody's network/servers into smoking rubble, it should be posted on the main Microsoft site in the next couple weeks.

Initial steps with Scripting System Center Configuration Manager

I've begun delving into the ConfigMgr SDK to start writing some scripts for it.  My primary interest is in working on a set of Resource Kit tools for Desired Configuration Manager.  I've found that everything I've looked so far has been in WMI.  Which is both a blessing and a curse. It certainly makes it easier to access from Powershell's native Get-WMIObject Cmdlet.

Obviously the first thing I needed to be able to do was figure out the right namespace.  Easy!  root/sms looks good.  Wait there's almost no information here... Time poke around some more.  Hey look an object named SMS_ProviderLocation What could that be?  Turns out it lists the sites that it knows about and most importantly it has a flag on which one is the local site and where the namespace for that site is. 

The method to my madness scripting wise is to break down every task in to the smallest reasonable chunks and create scripts or functions out of them.  This is what I have done for getting the sitecode.

get-sitecode.ps1

Param (
    [switch] $Verbose = $True,   
    [string] $ComputerName = '.'
)
Begin {
    if ($Verbose) {
        # Set verbosity
        $VerbosePreference = 2
    }
    $ErrorActionPreference = "Stop"
    # Constructed Variables
    $script:Namespace = $("root\sms")
    Write-Verbose $("Namespace: " + $Script:Namespace)
}
Process {
    #get baselines
    $q = 'select * from SMS_ProviderLocation where ProviderForLocalSite = true'
    $wmi = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $ComputerName -Namespace $Script:Namespace -Query $q -ErrorAction Stop
    Write-Output $wmi.SiteCode
}