Forcing a SCCM client to check for new Advertisements

When creating an advertisement in SCCM and you are testing it, it can be a pain waiting for the client to check-in. I know I’ve always just gone to the SCCM control panel aplet and from “Actions” clicked all of them which does the job, but which one is it?

Machine Policy Retrieval & Evaluation Cycle is the one you really want. It will take a minimum of 2 minutes before a new advertisement is presented to the client AFTER the policy retrieval cycle. There's no supported way to speed that up.



Source: Various users on http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/configmgrswdist/thread/a1066dfb-a71e-4e52-b7b7-c225ea0935a4/

iPhone Blogging

Even though I work in IT it still amazes me how far technology has come and how easy applications link together.

As a quick example I've just downloaded an app for my iPhone which should allow blogging including pics I have taken. Hopefully below is a pic of me!!

Until next time

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EDIT 23/1/2009
Ok, so the picture uploading didn't quite work. My faith in IT still having its problems has been restored :) Technology still has a way to go before it will start doing my housework and generally taking over the world.

My media player

For a month or so I've been getting together a media center PC for the living room. After looking at online at various pre-built ones like the Netear EVA700 amongst others, but none seamed to fit the bill. The list of things I wanted was:-
Ability to play

Source: Posting by MCentre at http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/278917

Finding Visnetics usage

We use Visnetic Mailflow at work. With over 250 email addresses being processed by the system I was curious as to which are still used. There is a admin page that shows how many times a rule has been hit, but not in a given time-frame. I can do some basic SQL queries but none got me what I needed. I knew I had to query the 'MatchToAddreses' table which lists all the email addresses all the routing rules use, and then also query the 'InboundMessages' table for the prevoiously found email addresses, but only count emails that have arrived since a given date.

Luckily there are some clever SQL boys here and they came up with the following query:-

SELECT  COUNT(DISTINCT im.InboundMessageID) AS [Count],
       mta.emailaddress AS [Address]
FROM dbo.MatchToAddresses mta
   LEFT JOIN dbo.InboundMessages im
       ON mta.emailaddress = im.EmailPrimaryTo
           AND im.EmailDatetime > 'Specify date'
GROUP BY mta.emailaddress
ORDER BY mta.emailaddress

I now have a list of how many times in the past 6 months an email address has been hit. From the 250 email addresses, 130 have been hit 10 times or less, and many have not been hit at all. I now have a fun job of pruning the addresses and subsiquent ruleset. Joy!

Ubuntu, ZFS-fuse and communication freezing

I have recently been building a NAS box to store all my pictures, documents etc. I have been trying Windows Home Server on the eva. While i was happy with its ability to make shares resilient to a drive failure by making a copy of every file be on a different drive I wasn't too happy with how it used the available space.

So after doing some reading and testing I setup an Ubuntu box and got zfs-fuse on (Google zfs and ubuntu for a good wiki guide I followed on how to do this). I was very impressed with how quickly I could setup a raid pool and with the ability to expand the space by replacing drives I in theory have a resilient, and expandable storage solution.

However when I was ssh'd into the box it kept hanging. I couldn't figure it out. I'm not all that familier with ubuntu and/or Linux in general to start in depth diagnostics. I thought it was something to do with the zfs-fuse so I installed opensolaris. However that was too bloated for what I needed. I thought it was because I had put on hardy and the guide said I should use intrepid. After installing that I still had the problem. But then I was using ssh from an external location into my home has and it was working fine. Why? Tech support days flashed back. Could it be MTU? A local ping of 1400 bytes worked. 1500 did not. A quick change to the ubuntu network settings and it's all singing.

My next step is to slowly replace the 4 120gb drives in the pool with 1tb drives. Nice!