My mind is going… or: Working with HALs
Here are some initial resources as I’m beginning to delve into the area of Hardware Abstraction Layers during our image build cycle. We’re looking at what HAL types can be mapped to others and which are incompatible to begin to consolidate some of our system images. Some Microsoft kb articles:
How to Troubleshoot Windows 2000 Hardware Abstraction Layer Issues
How to force a Hardware Abstraction Layer during an upgrade or an installation of Windows XP
HAL options after Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 Setup
More information to follow once we begin to more fully understand the copncept of Hardware Abstraction Layers.
Disable Chassis Intrusion detection
After deploying Dell OMCI to about 600 desktops and portables, an alert began displaying upon user logon:
Needless to say, users were somewhat confused by this.
To get rid of the message, we either had to:
- Run around to every Dell PC in the organization
- Uninstall Dell OMCI
- Remotely disable chassis intrusion detection and clear any current detections
Obviously we chose option three. With Dell’s OpenManage IT Assistant software, I was able to build a remote CIM command line to execute on a set of systems (in our case any system that was reporting a status of degraded). Here’s the command we ran:
system cim action=setcim ipaddress=$IP username=$USERNAME password=$PASSWORD authenticationlevel=packet classpropertyvalue=Dell_SMBIOSsettings::ChassisIntrusion:4
To execute the command, I setup a new command line task in ITA, targeted at a query of computers whose status was not “OK.” I set this to run once an hour, since clients were still being discovered and inventoried as this was happening. By setting the query to only hit degraded clents, we avoided running this needlessly on clients already configured properly.
Dell OpenManage Documentation
Dell’s Systems Management platform has been around for quite awhile. It has recently been getting more and more usable and comprehensive. While attempting to test and implement it in our achitecture, I have scrolled through pages and pages of documentation, forum threads, and configuration pages. Here are the pages that have been the most useful for me:
Dell OpneManage Client Instrumentation User’s Guide
Client Instrumentation Documentation
Dell OpenManage Server Administrator User’s Guide
Server Administrator Documentation
Dell OpenManage Client Connector User’s Guide
Client Connector Documentation
Dell OpenManage IT Assistant 7.2 User’s Guide
Here’s the platform in a nutshell: The Client Instrumentation (or Server Administrator for servers) is installed on the managed system and interfaces with the system’s data providers (BIOS, Disks, Chassis, etc), and makes this data accessible through the standard WMI interface. On the Management Station (usually a server set aside for Systems Management), the IT Assistant and Client Connector allow administrators to access and manage the systems and their configurations through the WMI Interface. IT Assistant is the main management application (one to many) that provides an overall view of system health and status and Client Connector (one to one) can be launched from IT Assistant to manage an individual client. Server Administrator can also be launched from within IT Assistant for individual Server Management, though it runs on the managed server rather than on the management station.
Some nutshell eh?
MyITForum.com – Awesome SMS 2003 Resource
Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to get a deeper understanding of SMS 2003. Unfortunately, the more I learn about SMS, the more I realize that it’s going to continue to broaden it’s scope of management. From the enhanced post-SP1 patch and update management features to the Operating System Deployment Feature Pack and beyond. Luckily, MyITForum.com has got more information than I could possibly ever read, tons of tools, downloads and an active forum of knowledgable experts. Expect to see plenty of links to these folks as I discover more of their content.
Force Infrastructure Operations Master Role seizure
After raising the domain and forest functional level to Windows 2003, one of our Global Catalog Servers upon reboot started complaining that it should not be the Infrastructure Operations Master as well. It was also for some sites the only configured DNS server. Even after seizing the role from another server, the original server claimed to have the role of IOM. We removed the Global Catalog role, and then forced the original server to seize the IOM role successfully and all was well again.
This fixed it.