1.6 is here with a couple of minor improvements including the ability to selectively install ConfigMgr 2012 x86 or x64 hotfixes based upon the client’s OS architecture. The other improvement is the ability to specify ccmsetup parameters (like source and BITSPriority). Grab it here: ConfigMgr Client Startup Script

First, thanks to both Ryan Boswell and Eric Morrison for contributing to this list as well as madluka and Steven Wilkinson. There has definitely been a lot of hoopla around Service Pack (SP) 1 for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr). From lots of failures actually caused by certain, over-zealous anti-virus/security products to the fact …
Read more

A common ask is how much space is needed to store user state data captured by USMT. This is an important question to answer so that you know how space you may potentially need when capturing user data to the network in traditional Replace scenario task sequences. It’s not an easy question to necessarily answer …
Read more

In a recent post about ConfigMgr 2012 Application Installation Failures, I discussed applying the hotfix described in KB2522623 during a build and capture task sequence to resolve access denied error for untrusted clients for Install Application tasks. As a follow-up, the brilliant, Quiet Shy (aka WMI) Guy just IMed me and asked whether you could …
Read more

Forest Discovery is a new feature in ConfigMgr 2012 that enables ConfigMgr to dynamically create boundaries based on subnet information in Active Directory and publish service location information to multiple forests. You can specify an account in the discovery’s configuration if the site server account does not have permissions to read from or write to …
Read more

I’ve seen this as an issue now a few times now in my lab and production environments as well as on the forums. In brief, this specific issue is an access denied (hresult of 0×80070005) when downloading the application content and is clearly denoted in either smsts.log (if the application install is during a task …
Read more

With the latest update to WSUS (described in KB2720211) also came an update to the WUA, version 7.6.7600.256; however, this updated WUA is not available for separate download and can only be installed directly via WSUS as described in KB949104. This is somewhat disconcerting for a handful of reasons including the following: There is no …
Read more

Why are 32-bit application installers special and why do they need special handling? First, a caveat: If you don’t have any 64-bit OSes in your environment (or never will), then there is nothing special about them. I think I can safely say that no one using ConfigMgr 2012 falls into this category though. On 64-bit …
Read more

I’ve seen a lot of environments and the one typical commonality is that there simply was no planning or forethought put into where to store everything like source files, packages, downloads, etc. Chaos reigns and it ain’t pretty. For all of my lab builds and production rollouts, I use a simple script to build up …
Read more

From time to time, I hear of or read about someone troubleshooting what they think may be a Windows Firewall related connectivity issue. To troubleshoot this, they stop the Windows Firewall service (either from services.msc , the command-line, or some other method). What this results in though is a total network lockdown of the system …
Read more