Brian S. Tucker

For those of you who have subscribed to any of the Level 5 guides, we would very much appreciate you taking a 5 minute survey to rate out training. Our commitment to your success can only be measured by your answers to the independent survey Microsoft uses to rate our Partner performance. So, if you have 5 minutes to help us out on this very important step, please email me at btucker @ smrllc.net and I will send you the information we need to send the survey to you.

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Illinois is about the WORST state in the Union for gun owners. Since I travel all the time, I have always wanted to take my gun with me, but would have had some problems.... not anymore in 32 states! Florida has an agreement with 32 states where even if you don't live in Florida, you can use this anyway. Below are the details.....  

I filled out the form on this link and got the paperwork in 2 days. http://licgweb.doacs.state.fl.us/license/forms.html

Add in your personal info and then select the Concealed Weapon of Firearm Application, Quantity 1

Fill out the form PER THE INSTRUCTION BOOKLET! Go to your local police department and have them fingerprint you, get a passport photo from the Post office for $15. Get a money order and send to Florida in the amount of $117 and in 90 days you have a permit to carry in 32 new states.

Here are the states where you can use your concealed license. http://licgweb.doacs.state.fl.us/news/concealed_carry.html

Also, a guy said that Utah has a similar program which adds a few states to the list. I have not looked into it yet.

I bought a holster for my Glock 32 and light / laser and am going to buy a Springfield Armory 1911 Sub-Compact .45 to replace the .45 Glock I don’t like. I should have t by the end of the month. I can’t wait. Awesome for small power and conceal carry. It felt perfect in my hands today.

 

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I have been a customer of Sprint for 8 years with the same number. I pay $125 a month for the PDA plan with all the bells and whistles. While I loved the Mogul HTC 6800 (all the way at the bottom of the list) phone I got 3 months ago, it's a great improvement from my 6700 I used to have. However, Sprint service area are terrible and I'm tired of it. Over the weekend I made the switch to the iPhone G3 and WOW, what a difference in service and bells and whistles. While I am having some problems with Office documents and Adobe files, it's ok because I can view them on my laptop which is never very far away. I bought the G3 with 16 GB of storage for $299 ($199 for the 8 GB model, but you need the extra space for the extra $100) and I have 150 songs and the movie Armageddon loaded (the picture and sound is superior in every way) and still have 11 GB left. It has a built-in GPS and I can get driving directions and so much more than what I had before.

I can connect to my Exchange server, VPN built-in and can have multiple POP3 accounts. SO, 3 email accounts and it rocks. Another sweet function that I did not have on the Mogul was an easy way for 3 way calling. It's so darn easy now that I don't know what to do with it. AND, the Mogul phone keypad was SLOW AS DIRT and the keypad on the iPhone is lightning fast. Everything is lightning fast....

If you are in the market for a new phone and your a Microsoft junkie like me, how can anyone give you crap when you bought a perfect phone. Also get the high end ear phones that you can talk on. It's $100 more, but WELL worth it. I have the same type for my Nano. Anyone want to buy it? I have no need for it anymore.LOL..

Looking at it in the store is nothing until you get to bring it home and go crazy with it. GET IT! Don't worry Microsoft, I still run Vista and will never buy a MAC.... but the phone rocks to high hell!

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It's been a long day in several respects. We found out at 10:00 AM that our server bandwidth was too small for the amount  of traffic we had with app the people watching the Level 5 Guides. First we moved the cable to a 100MB switch and that was ok, but the firewall was unable to handle to the resources. So, we ordered a higher end firewall and we are running faster than before. All of you who found the videos choppy (like when you are in a hotel with crappy Internet), I am sorry for the inconvenience. We extended the open house for an extra hour because of the disruption.

So, now comes the next wave from the other side of the globe. All of you who live east of England should be able to access the Level 5 site for free tonight at 10:00 pm - 12:00 AM (-6 GMT). You have to be a registered user to view the videos and your company must have port 88 open to view the videos on the site. We are working on changing that in the near future. It would be a great benefit to hear what people have to say about the Level 5 Guides so we can learn from your opinions and make them better. I have opened a new post in the forums and hope that anyone who watched will give feedback (both positive and negative) so we can work on fine tuning our offerings.

2 hours until the next Open House event. Thank God I bought a hardcore server to run all this.....

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Having a Task Sequence that does all your work for you is a tough job at times and depending on how many hardware platforms you have will determine how long it takes to make and test your Task Sequence. In this video I demonstrate how to advertise an existing Task Sequence to a live SCCM client in the domain. The process will take you through the end users perspective of what he or she will potentially expect to see during the entire process. After the system is rebuilt, we look at the SCCM report and also view the graph to validate that the process completed successfully. Although the link to Microsoft's Library on "Task Sequence Variables" is in the other video, I have added it here as well. Also, if you have not seen the other video where I create and show the various steps in my Task Sequence, you can download the exported .XML from this location.

Watch the Video!

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I was very surprised to see that Microsoft has released a new DCM Baseline for Energy Efficiency based on a post at the SMS & MOM blog. Per the post, you can download the DCM Baseline here. It seems that Microsoft is taking bits and pieces of third party products and making them incorporated into SCCM. While I figure Microsoft has a checklist of items they want to make, they only go so far and still leave room for the third party companies to keep their products alive such as 1E and my favorite SMS / SCCM Expert's SCCM Companion tool. WOL and now this Power Management baseline only seem to keep the Microsoft folks at a level of "content" as they add these new features. While these freely included additions are a "nice to have" feature and I will probably use in some fashion this new Energy Efficiency pack for baselines, I will still stick to SCCM Companion as it's a far superior product. Below is the excerpt from the download and also the link to all the DCM packs.

"Overview

• 8/5/2008 - Original English release, version 1.0"

You can view and download all the DCM packs here on demand.

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After speaking to the other Level 5 Guide owners, they have all agreed to open their guides during the times I specified in my post yesterday. Our "Open House" day is to let you experience some of the content that we have available. I don't know of any other site that charges any fee and opens the doors to all the videos for even 5 minutes. I encourage as many people as possible to join our Open House and experience a portion of each of the guides. Search out the videos you are interested in now so you know which ones to focus on during the hours the Level 5 section will be open to all registered users. If you are not a registered user, please register clicking on this link to join. Please use your real email address as we sometimes send out important messages related to the site.

You will have the ability to view as many of the 82 Level 5 videos as you can during the Open House. Below are the following topics that you can choose from:

System Center Configuration Manager

System Center Operations Manager (MVP)

Windows Server 2008

WSUS 3.0 SP1

SQL 2008 (MVP)

Word 2007 - Office Professional 2007

Note: We are always looking to hire independent contractors to make Level 5 videos! If you have a specialty we have not covered, please email me and we can discuss the requirements. By default, each guide owner gets 50% of each subscription.....

We are also pleased to announce that we have achieved another Microsoft Partner competency today for Security Solutions! We are moving at the speed of light and making our mark! Join the ride with us.....if only for a day on August 13th, 2008.

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We have had a tremendous success rate for our new Level 5 section since it opened in late April. The guide subscriptions are moving at a very good pace, but we want everyone to have a chance to experience the "higher level" of videos training we are producing on several Microsoft technologies. I have received so many emails about the SCCM guide and appreciating the content and how it has helped them in learning and deploying SCCM in their environment. So, I decided that I will open my Guide on SCCM to all registered users from 10:00 am - 12:00 pm next Wednesday August 13th for the people in the USA and eastern Europe time zones. The guide will also be open from 10:00 pm - 12:00 AM the same day to accommodate the users on the other side of the world.

Many times people are hesitant to subscribe because they cannot see what they are missing. So, this is your chance to take a look at my guide on SCCM and watch as many as possible so that you can determine if you want to subscribe. If you choose not to, at least you will have hopefully learned something useful.

Edwin Sarmiento who runs the SQL 2008 guide will also open his guide during this time based on the official RTM release on SQL 2008.

I will post if other guides will be open during this time. Remember, you MUST be a registered user of the site to view any of the videos. Check back to see if other guides will be made available.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! Remember: these open times are based on USA CST -6 GMT.

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As I stated in my other post, building a TS which will to just about everything in one TS is the key. Rather than having a few or dozens of Task Sequences, we want to have one or two that will work on all your hardware platforms. The following Level 5 video will show you how to deploy the Bare Metal machine usinf a TS with SCCM 2007 SP1 in mixed mode. Click on the image below to view the video! We look at all the needed components from DHCP to SCCM configurations and the steps in the TS to make sure your advertisement runs as smooth as possible. We customize the Boot Image and make a custom background and use the command prompt to copy the SMSTS.log to the server so we can read it in SMS Trace as well as monitor the deployment in the reports, and let you watch the process of the whole PXE sequence. Let me know if you have questions on the video by leaving comments in the video page.

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I have received numerous emails asking for videos on OSD and how they work. While we all know that each organization has different requirements and goals, I have put together a video in the Level 5 section that shows how to put together a Task Sequence which will work for OSD. I show step by step how to create the TS with all the section needed for a workstation build. If you find yourself having problems finding the right steps, then this video is what you want to view as one wrong mistake can cause the TS to fail. Not only are the proper steps important, you need to make sure some of them have conditions setup to validate that the step in the TS functions or queries properly to validate that it should or should not run. I have included a few links to Microsoft's Library which has some great information on OSD Task Sequence to assist you in building the right TS for your needs. Enjoy the video!

OSD Library Home

PXE Support

Troubleshooting OSD Issues

Configuring Operation System Deployment

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SMR, LLC owns and operates The Blogcast Repository website. We have been working very hard delivering training with our new Level 5 video training section of the website. With this in place we have been able to complete another Microsoft Partner competency for Advanced Infrastructure Solutions - Systems Management.

We also are very close to becoming a Microsoft Gold Partner in the near future! We appreciate everyone's support of this community website and can see things picking up even more as the next few months come by. Our focus on Microsoft community and System Center product line will continue to be our primary focus.

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Tonight I added 3 new videos to the SCCM Level 5 Guide on Software Updates. I have one more to complete and that should be uploaded in the next few days. The videos show how simple and complex deploying updates can be in SCCM. There is a lot of information you need to know and I hope the videos lead you in the right direction. The 3 videos show an overview of Software Updates in the console, how to begin to use and understand the various sections and then deploy SP3 to 2 XP SP2 systems. The 4th video will be on how to validate in SCCM that the update was successfull through reports, the Software Updates section and hardware inventory. These few videos are just the beginning on this subject and run about 50 minutes if you watch all 3 which is why on the larger subjects I'm starting to break them down a bit. Each of the 3 part videos are available now and can be found on the URL above on page 2. As I have time, more will come.... as there is a lot more I have to demonstrate on this subject. As always, I hope you enjoy them.

If you have yet to subscribe to the SCCM guide and you need to understand SCCM, just visit the link and I have over 6 hours of content at your disposal. More will come.... so stay tuned!

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To start off this post which I have a lot to say, I will use the 2 words "intelligence" and "negligence" in the same sentence. You don't often hear that, but I think it sums up several experiences I have seen so far with SCCM prerequisite checker. I have had the privilege of doing several live upgrades at different organizations and found that in each there are significant warnings and errors in the prereq checker.

Let's start off with the basics. You should always run the prereq checker before the installation of SCCM whether you have a fresh install or an upgrade. Fresh installs seem to be fairly straight forward and generally require a few hotfixes. Now, I will rant for a moment that Microsoft has made it ridiculous to lead you to an update that you have to give your email address to have an email with the download link and then a STUPID password to unlock the update. Really... why do you folks do that? The only plus that I can give is that the email comes generally within 5 minutes, but still.... can we please stop the madness? A password for a hotfix you requested and was sent by email to you???

Ok, this is a serious post, so read on....  Now the real fun begins for those of you who are doing upgrades from SMS to SCCM. I'm willing to bet that most of you run the checker and read what's in the wizard and get the hotfix and try and figure out why you have some of the other warnings and or errors. Warnings will allow you to upgrade / install fresh and errors will forbid you from upgrading. Sounds fair and this is where from the first sentence I use the word "intelligence". When you get a warning and or error, you just double click and it gives you general information on the error. There is one awesome warning that I can't remember for the life of me, but you double click on the warning and it gives such a description that the whole explanation is given and says to download at: and it ends.... where is the link?

Here is the good and the bad. You have to know that the ConfigMgrPrereq.log is located on the root of C:\. Open the log file (SMS Trace: newbies) and look for the warning such as the ones in the image below. There, for that specific warning (mentioned above) you will get the link. I think it's too funny, but maybe not... hmmm...

So, errors are critical, but not always accurate. I had a critical error the other day and a reboot fixed it. I had a warning that there was a backlog of files and (if you look in the log file) it was only 2 files that were 2 days old. I'm thinking of the times when discovery happens too fast for SMS or SCCM to process and you have an inbox with over 100,000 files... not the case. 2 FILES CAUSED THE WARNING! Those files were the only 2 files in the Despooler inbox.

There is another MAJOR concern with warnings. There is a warning that states something about your DP's may not be updated with the proper version. This should have been made a STOP error by Microsoft. I ignored this and it killed the install and we had to restore the server from backup. YES, always backup your server and SMS before an upgrade. Don't get stuck in a bind and get your client or boss's panties in a bunch because you skipped a critical step. On this particular issue, you get to the install point and the components are installing and half way through, you get a blue circle and a blue circle at the bottom of the page. This is NOT good. You need to make sure you have the proper version of the package on all the DP's. This error happens generally when (and I don't know why people do this... sorry) a package is made and it's never sent to a DP. Once it's sent to a DP, a HASH is made in the SQL table. If there is no hash, then you get the warning.

Another DP warning is when it tells you that you have a HASH MISMATCH. When I saw BOTH of these warnings in the same log, I thought that fixing one would fix the other. Nope.... They are both very different and have to be dealt with.

Bottom line, all errors and warnings should be fixed as much as possible except the ones where you know it makes no difference. One example of that is when you get the warning about an operating system not being at the proper version. Yes, some people still run operating systems under Windows 2000 SP4. There should be IT police for this sort of behavior, but that's another post.

Let's get dirty (no not that way... all you IT folks are the same.. LOL)! I spoke about the log file and that is the topic of the conversation. Whether you have errors or warnings, you MUST read the log. the log gives you MUCH more info than the wizard. Not only do you get what you see in the wizard, but gives some interesting solutions to fix the issue(s). Notice the image below. I have copied one of the queries below. You copy the query and run it in SQL 2005 to find the problem.

SELECT GSYS.Domain0, GSYS.Name0, site.SMS_Installed_Sites0, GHSYS.Domain0 AS 'Previous Domain', GHSYS.Name0 AS 'Previous Name',  GSYS.SMSID0 AS SMS_Unique_Identifier0 FROM System_DATA GSYS JOIN System_HIST GHSYS ON GSYS.MachineID = GHSYS.MachineID JOIN System_SMS_Instal_ARR site ON GSYS.MachineID=site.ItemKey WHERE GSYS.Name0!=GHSYS.Name0 UNION SELECT RSYS.Resource_Domain_OR_Workgr0 as Domain0, RSYS.Name0, site.SMS_Installed_Sites0, GSYS.Domain0 AS 'Previous Domain', GSYS.Name0 AS 'Previous Name', RSYS.SMS_Unique_Identifier0 FROM System_DISC RSYS JOIN System_DATA GSYS ON RSYS.ItemKey = GSYS.MachineID JOIN System_SMS_Instal_ARR site ON RSYS.ItemKey=site.ItemKey WHERE RSYS.Name0!=GSYS.Name0  UNION SELECT