A quick post this time about something that might be helpful for others, something that saves me from typing too much 🙂

I’ve noticed over the last week that I’ve been doing various remoting commands through Invoke-Command to the same machines, which require additional credentials to access.

Why re-type something when you can automate it 🙂

Before

I used to have to do the following:

$SCCMServers = 'CM01.contoso.com','CM02.contoso.com','CM03.contoso.com','CM04.contoso.com'

$cred_SCCM = Import-CliXml $CredStore\contoso.xml

Invoke-Command -ComputerName $SCCMServers -Credential $cred_SCCM -Scriptblock {whatever needed to be done}

Where my SCCM servers are in another forest as my management machine and $CredStore is my personal Credential folder which contains credentials for various systems/domains, as I use these regularly and I’m lazy

As you might have noticed, I’m having fun playing around with SCCM lately and have really noticed that PowerShell is king here.

While the application has great potential, I personally feel that the GUI is lacking functionality which you can only obtain through PowerShell. Of course this isn’t a problem, merely a challenge in some cases, but I feel that they could’ve stepped up a bit. It at least explains why I see so many SCCM admins playing around with PowerShell.

I’m in the finishing stages of a new SCCM deployment, but also in the process of an Active Directory consolidation at the moment, and ran in to the following issue:

A machine from Domain A has been re-imaged using SCCM to run in Domain B. SCCM has a Device Collection X for Domain A and Device Collection Y for Domain B. Device Collection Y has a Deployment for a specific VPN Application that’s required, otherwise it won’t run.

New toys!

As mentioned before, I’ve recently started a new assignment, one that required me to design and roll out a System Center Configuration Manager solution for 4 locations.

While that wasn’t too difficult and the configuration was quite straightforward [thanks to my friends at Manning and Google], the biggest challenge came when creating packages to deploy. Luckily I was quite familiar with packaging and .MSI editing due to various MDT configurations I had made, but the latest “Current Branch” version of SCCM has “Applications”, which are smart packages [pieces of software] which you can deploy, but also uninstall if you want.

OK, so I’m at my new job and for the first time in years, I have to deal with proxy servers again…

Since I’m used to having full admin rights on my machine and unrestricted internet, this was somewhat of a shock, while perfect for my productivity as well 😛

Unfortunately for them, I have since been informed that a special IT proxy is available, which provides this access, hence me being able to update my site again 🙂

Hi all,

It’s been a while, but I’ve kept myself busy in the meantime. During my last post on my blog, I was waiting for an assignment at my new job at OSC, only to be presented with a new challenge which kept me from posting for a while [expect more posts soon!!].

In the meantime I had also agreed to provide small training/demo session on PowerShell along with my new colleague Danny den Braver, to show people how awesome it actually is, while even showing them some PowerShell on Linux things [a few Linux guys there 🙂 ].