Came across this tool recently which allows you to easily schedule SCOM Maintenance mode between time periods you want to , which could either be on a recurring or one off basis. It also allows you to place all agents into maintenance mode at once or you could choose individual agents also.

You can get this tool from the “System Center Operations Manager R2 Admin Resource Kit”  http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26139

First of all if we start off by extracting the files from the MSI. You should be able to see “ScheduleMaintenanceMode” folder , this is the one we are interested in.

If you expand this folder and then expand the architecture relevant to your SCOM install.

Copy the two DLL’s below to the RMS in the SCOM program files.  (Default “C:Program FilesSystem Center Operations Manager 2007”)

Once you have done this import the “ScheduleMaintenanceMode.Library.mp” management pack provided in the resource kit.

Now we need to run the “ScheduleMaintenanceMode.exe” which you probably noticed is in the same location as the dll’s we mentioned earlier. If you copy this Exe to a location on the RMS where it’s easily accessible then you will now be able to set up maintenance mode schedules in an easy to use GUI .

Just to let you know Exchange 2010 Ru4 has been pulled from the Download Centre.

This is due to an issue , where by moving or copying a folder via an outlook client actually deletes subfolder and content in the folder.

Microsoft are going to be sorting this issue in the next Exchange Rollup ( RU5 ) which is due for release around August.

For more information please see http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/07/13/exchange-2010-sp1-ru4-removed-from-download-center.aspx

Just a quick useful command to find out which SCOM agents in your environment are proxy enabled.

If you run the following command in SCOM PowerShell.

get-agent | fl Displayname ,Proxyingenabled

This will give you an output like below.

DisplayName     : Servername.domain.com
ProxyingEnabled : False

Just a quick command which allows you to view the size of an individual users mailbox.

Get-MailboxStatistics –identity USERNAME | fl ,DisplayName, TotalItemSize

You could also expand this command to view the size of each users mailbox is in a certain mailbox database with the following command.

Get-MailboxStatistics –database DatabaseName | fl ,DisplayName, TotalItemSize

We came across an issue recently where every user that had their IE set to automatically detect settings could not access the internet.  Their IE settings were push out via WPAD that was pushed out via DHCP.

We had published WPAD via our TMG and configured the DHCP scope accordingly. However when any user tried to access the internet the connection failed. But if the users pointed their proxy manually to the TMG the internet worked fine.

To troubleshoot this we did logging on the TMG and we noticed that the destination of all Wpad  requests from the client were going to the RAS adapter on the TMG instead of the internal adapter.

To resolve this we ran the following VBScript on TMG. “referenced from http://blogs.technet.com/b/isablog/archive/2008/06/26/understanding-by-design-behavior-of-isa-server-2006-using-kerberos-authentication-for-web-proxy-requests-on-isa-server-2006-with-nlb.aspx”

Const fpcCarpNameSystem_DNS = 0

Const fpcCarpNameSystem_WINS = 1

Const fpcCarpNameSystem_IP = 2

Dim oISA: Set oISA = CreateObject( “FPC.Root” )

Dim oArray: Set oArray = oISA.GetContainingArray

Dim oWebProxy: Set oWebProxy = oArray.ArrayPolicy.WebProxy

If fpcCarpNameSystem_DNS = oWebProxy.CarpNameSystem Then

WScript.Echo “ISA is already configured to provide DNS names in the WPAD script”

WScript.Quit

End If

oWebProxy.CarpNameSystem = fpcCarpNameSystem_DNS

oWebProxy.Save true

WScript.Echo “ISA was configured to provide DNS names in the WPAD script…”

After the script was run auto-detect worked for all clients and WPAD requests went through the correct network adapter on TMG.

We came across an issue recently where we had an issue with our Hyper-V 2008 R2 server. The BOOTMGR file went missing on a reboot , all this was repaired by running Bootrec commands.

After the above the Hyper-V server would boot up however none of the VM’s would start and came up with the following error

“The virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running. The following actions may help you resolve the problem:

1) Verify that the processor of the physical computer has a supported version of hardware-assisted virtualization.

2) Verify that hardware-assisted virtualization and hardware-assisted data execution protection are enabled in the BIOS of the physical computer. (If you edit the BIOS to enable either setting, you must turn off the power to the physical computer and then turn it back on. Resetting the physical computer is not sufficient.)

3) If you have made changes to the Boot Configuration Data store, review these changes to ensure that the hypervisor is configured to launch automatically.”

The issue was that when we recreated the BCD store in did not set the Hypervisor to launch automatically.

We resolved this by running the following command “bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto” after a reboot all worked fine

We had an issue recently with one of our Windows 2008 R2 servers , where after reboot the server did not come back up and showed the following error “BOOTMGR is Missing”

I fixed the by recreating the Boot Configuration Data Store.

• Insert 2008 R2 media and boot onto it
• Choose Repair and System Recovery Tool
• Choose Command Prompt
• Run the Following commands
  Rename c:bootBCD bcd.old
  Bootrec / RebuildBcd
  Bootrec / FIXMBR
  Bootrec / FixBoot
  Cd “X:Sourcesrecovery”
  StartRep.exe
• Reboot Server and all should be ok
• If Server has the Hyper-v role installed make sure to run “bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto” and reboot.

After this all should be up and Running

We came across an issue recently on a Exchange 2007 server in regards to services not automatically started when the server was rebooted.

After reviewing the event log post start up i found the following events.

“Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7022
Description:
The FSCController service hung on starting

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7001
Description:
The FSEIMC service depends on the FSCController service which failed to start because of the following error:
After starting, the service hung in a start-pending state.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7001
Description:
The Microsoft Exchange Transport service depends on the FSEIMC service which failed to start because of the following error:
The dependency service or group failed to start.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7001
Description:

The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service depends on the FSCController service which failed to start because of the following error:
After starting, the service hung in a start-pending state.”

The cause of this issue was down to Forefront Security for Exchange , installing Forefront Security for Exchange SP2 fixed the issue

Microsoft KB Documenting the Issue“http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961728”

Here’s a few quick PowerShell commands that will allow you to Disable or Enable a Service and Start or Stop a particular service.

To Enable a particular service run the following command. (Please Edit ServiceName to the desired service)

Set-Service ServiceName -StartupType Automatic

To Disable a particular service run the following command.

Set-Service ServiceName -StartupType Disabled

To Stop a particular service run the following command.

Stop-Service ServiceName

To Start a particular service run the following command.

Start-Service ServiceName

You can also combine the commands in a ps1 file , for example if you want to Disable and Stop a Service you would run the following.

“Set-Service ServiceName -StartupType Disabled
Stop-Service ServiceName”

Just a quick command here to logoff remote machines via PowerShell

“(gwmi win32_operatingsystem -ComputerName ComputerName -cred (get-credential)).Win32Shutdown(4)”

This will log every user off the machine specified above.