System Center Blog by Russ Slaten

In large environments, with tens of thousands of SMS 2003 clients, inventory may get "lost" for various reasons. An example of a lost inventory is below: An SMS 2003 Advanced Client reports a full inventory upon install The client continues to...

I recently worked on an issue sequencing an application with the Softgrid 4.1 SP1 and 4.2 Sequencer. After selecting a location to download the virtual environment (after the install was completed) an error would appear "SystemGuard download failed (error...

I recently worked on an issue where a customer was trying to programmatically delete a mandatory assignment from an SMS 2003 advertisement. I saw that adding an assignment is a very easy and documented task, however deleting the same assignment is not...

The SMS MP Guide actually tells you this: "To specify the location of the SMS installation folder the script uses a system environment variable on the SMS site server. The administrator must create the %SMS_INSTALL_DIR_PATH% environment variable as a...

I recently had a customer ask me why the TimeOfFirstEvent and TimeOfLastEvent fields in an alert get set to 12/30/1899 when their custom application, which uses the MOM Connector Framework (MCF), uses UpdateAlerts() to set the resolution state of an alert...

I have recently done some research on exactly how inventory is generated, including deltas, and have listed the information below. This information can be obtained by monitoring the inventory agent logs, verbose WMI logs, and applicable inventory WMI...