Monday, December 31, 2007

SMS 2003 to SCCM 2007 Migratation

There are alot of resources to work on your upgrade.
One problem that we has run into is that our 2005 SQL server is 64bit and it isn't supported by SMS 2003 so our upgrade will be a slightly more complex process. I have run the database upgrade test on the 2005 for Sccm and it upgrades fine so I can move it but it will be more touchy.
These are just 2 guides that you can start with. Once I have my system upgraded I plan to have exactly what did here. Since every install is different not everyone will have the nice "Drop in a CD and upgrade."

Full SCCM documentation
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb735860.aspx

PKI for Native Mode
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb694035.aspx

Friday, December 14, 2007

Install as a specific user

"Question is there a way to tell SMS to run a package as a specified user? By default, I only see two options: User context or Administrative, which runs the package as localsystem (not good when my packages need to resolve env. variables not available to localsystem). Can I specify a specific account with special rights to install a package as? Thanks!"


The straight answer to this is no. You can only run as the local system or as the current user. If you need to run in an admin mode but using the current user for enviromental vars then you can't use the SMS depoly to to this. There are some "wrappers" that you can use that will elivate the install as the current user to an admin so it will install using their env variables. Their are some other ways but it is not easy. I was forced to install an app as the local system but I had it map some drives that the user would have and then afterwards I changed the "current user" registry so it will work for the local user and not the local system.

Saturday, December 8, 2007

Reinstalling Managment Point

Is it possible to reinstall the management point and not injure the SMS structure?
Yes, I have uninstall the MP, IIS, and reinstalled them both without failure. We had a MP error that of course prevented the clients to contact them. HTTP_ERROR. The only resolution from both the forums and Microsoft was to uninstall MP and IIS and start over. All the while the clients were in a tizzy since they couldn't get to the MP. Some would continue to run an Advertisement since it couldn't send the "complete" command and the policy said to install it until it was done. Well in my haste to get it all installed and working I forgot to put BITS on it. So I was forced to stop was I was doing and install BITS to it. But in the end it was all done. It took almost 5 hours to diagnose, get a response and get the whole thing redone. The nice part is that it has been almost a year and no sign to that problem again.