ConfigMgr Frontline

Have you ever had problems with a "bad" driver? You get occassional BSODs and maybe even lost some work? The reason could be that you have unsigned/unverified drivers. Luckily, there is a built-in tool for verifying drivers! And, unlike many things Microsoft, it is actually named intuitively! VERIFIER! So, how do we use it? Well, that is the easy part. You launch it, click "yes" to elevate it, click Next - Next and it will tell you if you have any unsigned drivers. It is that easy! Once you indentify the unsigned driver(s), you only need to go visit the device manufacturer website and download the latest, signed drivers. Another reason a driver may crash (or cause a BSOD) is because it was not made for the version of Windows you are on. Luckily, verifier can also help with that! Launch verifier, click Next, Next and hopefully you'll get a message that no unsigned drivers were found. If so, then the next thing you'll want to do is scan for &q

I have my HD partitioned into a C: and D:. C: is about 100gb and the plan was to use it for the OS and Office. D: is about 900gb and I use it for everything else – downloads, OneDrive, etc. I noticed my C: drive was running out of space and the culprit was my Outlook OST!! My OST was about 48gb!! (I like to download the maximum amount so searches go faster.) I tried to move the OST to D: using the “Account Settings...” and even editing the registry, ut Outlook was not having it. It kept recreating the OST on C: and ignoring the OST file I had moved. So, I decided to play a trick on Outlook. First, I created a folder on D: called Outlook. Next, I closed Outlook and *MOVED* my OST from C:\Users\ \AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\ to D:\Outlook\ Now for the magic. I created a symbolic link to the OST file!! (You can also use the junction tool from Sysinternals.) From a CMD prompt: mklink C:\Users\ \AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\emailid@contoso.com.ost D:\Outlook\emailid@contoso

Imagine my surprise when my Dell Latitude 5501 was able to be upgraded to 64GB of RAM when the specifications state it has a maximum of 32GB. My guess is marketing. They want to sell you a more expensive model that officially supports more RAM. Here is a link to the RAM that worked for me. Anyway, if you are looking to upgrade your 5501, go ahead and move to 64GB.

When configuring an Windows Client and Server CI, be careful when choosing the OS that will assess the CI for compliance! Note that for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 the phrasing says “and higher” after them. What this means is if you choose Windows Server 2016, the CI will apply to *both* Server 2016 *and* Server 2019 (even if you don’t choose “Windows Server 2019”)! As you can imagine, this can cause problems if you are wanting the CI to only apply to Server 2016! You can get around this by using the option “ Specify the version of Windows manually ”. However, that option does not appear if you choose “ This configuration item contains application settings ” under “ Windows Desktops and Servers (custom) ”. The only thing you can choose is “ This application runs only on computers that have 64-bit hardware ”. If you do not choose the "This configuration item contains application settings" you could then utilize a script to make sure it only appli

Ran across some Windows 7 systems that were not getting updates. I started down the normal troubleshooting path by looking at various logs. The logs mostly looked good. However, the datatransferservice.log was lit up like a Christmas tree! The log was full of all kinds of HTTP errors but these two stood out: WINHTTP_CALLBACK_STATUS_SECURE_FAILURE WINHTTP_CALLBACK_STATUS_FLAG_SECURITY_CHANNEL_ERROR After researching a bunch of IIS sites including this one , I finally narrowed it down to something with TLS. Turns out they had disabled TLS 1.0 on the MP but the client (Windows 7 SP1) did not support TLS 1.2. In order for a Windows 7 client to support TLS 1.2, you have to upgrade .NET and apply KB3140245 . This patch appears to be standalone and not part of any other cumulative. It can be found in the Microsoft Catalog . After installing the patch and rebooting, the client was then able to communicate with the MP and get the patches it needed. Good luck!

Happy Monday, fellow ConfigMgr administrators! I ran across a pretty difficult Task Sequence last week that had me scratching my head. It involved a pretty complex Task Sequence that contained over 50 applications. The Task Sequence would fail within 5 seconds upon launch from the Software Center with an message of  “The software could not be found on any servers at this time.” No error code was given. I ended up removing all the apps from the TS and adding them back one at a time. Many of the applications had at least one supersedence, dependencies and dependency chaining. It turned out there was one particular superseded application that  was missing its content!! Yeah, that would do it. Unfortunately, ConfigMgr did not log what application or package ID had its content missing so it was a crap shoot trying to find it.  I really feel like there should have been a log somewhere that gave this information. This is the only log information I coul

Where the heck is the #($*@(*#$# panther logs? Logfile location Description $windows.~bt\Sources\Panther Log location before Setup can access the drive. $windows.~bt\Sources\Rollback Log location when Setup rolls back in the event of a fatal error. %WINDIR%\Panther Log location of Setup actions after disk configuration. %WINDIR%\Inf\Setupapi .log Used to log Plug and Play device installations. %WINDIR%\Memory.dmp Location of memory dump from bug checks. %WINDIR%\Minidump.dmp Location of log minidumps from bug checks. %WINDIR%\System32\Sysprep\Panther Location of Sysprep logs.

This one was a real head scratcher. After upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10 1809, you could not open the Start Menu. When you would click on it, nothing would happen. You could also not perform a search. I saw in the System event log: "The server Microsoft.Windows.ShellExperienceHost _10.0.17763.1_neutral_neutral_cw5n1h2txyewy! App did not register with DCOM within the required timeout." about every 30 seconds. I noticed the same thing with Cortana. and "The server Microsoft.Windows.Cortana _1.11.6.17763_neutral_neutral_cw5n1h2txyewy!CortanaUI.AppXfbn8w4s0jbk3tjevpcn9kaxerc6rby8k.mca did not register with DCOM within the required timeout." I captured a procmon trace and found: Both ShellExperienceHost.exe and SearchUI.exe exit with an error (-1073741790 which is Access Denied) as soon as they try to load sysfer.dll (part of Symantec Endpoint Protection). See https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.TECH252314.html Evidently, sysf