More MDM SP1 Info.. Proxy and Work Exceptions

As part of the Mobile Device Manager work that i'm involved with I've been looking at Mobile Device GPOs. I've started reading about the Network Connection settings. There's an interesting article over at the enterprisemobile with regards to the Proxy/Work network configuration. I've found it very helpful and ended up following it for our implementation.

Virgin's Advanced Network Error Search

In a semi hungover state, I tried browsing over to Facebook but accidentally entered www.face. Instead of receiving the traditional address not found error page, I got the following;

Contrary to the rumours this is not a modification to your machine or browser but instead the way in which Virgin are handling DNS requests for addresses that are not found (NXDOMAIN). I've not decided whether it's good or bad at the moment but would rather it be an Opt-In service rather than Opt-Out. El-Reg covered this back in August and there's a lengthly discussion on cable forum regarding this - link

MDM SP1 SCW Manifests

Before deploying servers into the production environment at work, we run the Security Configuration Wizard to harden the Operating System. Hardening involves such things as disabling unnecessary Services, adjusting authentication methods and setting Windows Firewall Exception in an effort to reduce the overall attach surface of the Operating System. While Server 2003 SP1 includes a number of default templates, additional templates are available for download on the Internet.

As part of the MDM deployment that I'm involved with, I've been looking to harden the servers before they go live. The MDM Dev Team at Microsoft were kind enough to create manifests and bundle them in the MDM SP1 Server Resource Kit. I've yet to try them but I expect them to function as the others do. The MDM SP1 Resource Kit can be downloaded here.

64bit VM on a 32bit OS with VMware Workstation

I'm in the process of deploying MS SCMDM SP1 and have decided to first install the various components (MDM Gateway, Enrolment and Management Servers) in a isolated local VMware Environment before doing the live install. I stumbled upon a problem with running the 64bit Windows 2003 OS on my 32bit Windows XP laptop OS. Basically VMware Workstation was complaining that the CPU on the laptop was not compatible with the 64bit OS that i was trying to run on the VM.

There was two steps to resolve this;

• Enable Intel Virtualisation Technology in my laptop's BIOS
• Power off the laptop and then power on (a hot restart was not enough for this BIOS option to be recognised.)

There's also a handy CPU tester from VMware which will check your Host CPU for 32/64bit compatibility. It can be found here

Sysprep Answer File Location in VMware ESX 3.5/VC 2.5

I was looking for the file location of the Sysprep answer files in Virtual Centre 2.5 used with ESX 3.5 when creating a new Customisation Specification for a X64 VM Template but couldn't find it. I realise Customisation Specifications can be accessed in VC via Edit > "Customisation Specifications..." but really wanted to know where and how they were stored.

Not being able to find anything on net, I asked a colleague. He pointed out that they reside in a table in the VC SQL DB called 'VPX_CUSTOMIZATION_SPEC'.

Relocating SQL Server System Database Files

I have built a fair few SQL Servers over the last few years and always look to relocate the System DBs from their default location in the Install folder. The following MS KB article explains how to move the TempDB, MSDB, Model and Master on SQL Server 7, 2000 & 2005. Article is here

SCOM SNMP Monitor Issues

While creating a test SNMP Probe which produced alerts, we encountered issues around how to match the returned SNMP value for a Cisco Device's CPU OID.

To return the SNMP value you can use;

"/DataItem/SnmpVarBinds/SnmpVarBind[1]/Value" without the quotes.

The URL for the article is here

Also we found issues when using expression matching on numeric values returned via SNMP. this is due to the wizard creating the rules to expect String datatypes rather than Integer. The article can be found here.