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February 2006 - Posts

Friday, February 17, 2006 5:26 PM

Now Available - Beta Program for SMS 2003 DCM Configuration Manifests

Visit http://connect.microsoft.com to register for the DCM Configuration Manifest Beta program ! This program has been established to test and validate sample configuration files for Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004, Microsoft
Posted by Sai Kodi | 1 Comments
Tuesday, February 14, 2006 11:10 PM

Extending Reporting capabilities of the Desired Configuration Monitoring Solution - DCM Solution

As you are already aware, the DCM Solution comes out of the box with four out-of-compliance and ten in-compliance reports. You can get access to all these reports by deploying the Reports Component of the DCM Solution. Now, the questions still remain...
Posted by Sai Kodi | 3 Comments
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Monday, February 13, 2006 9:09 PM

Rule Referencing in Desired Configuration Monitoring Solution

Rule-referencing is one of the most helpful features in the DCM Solution which can help you frame complex queries! This post explains about the rule referencing feature in the DCM Authoring tool. Well, as the name suggests, it basically means referencing
Posted by Sai Kodi | 0 Comments
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Sunday, February 12, 2006 2:39 PM

Architecture of the Desired Configuration Monitoring - DCM Solution

The diagram below gives an overview of the DCM Solution architecture. This post basically explains what the different components of the DCM Architecture are and how they talk to each other to get the whole stuff working! 1. Install DCM. You can install
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Saturday, February 11, 2006 10:48 AM

Rules are ignored by the DCM Solution when a Setting does not exist!!!

In the current version of the DCM Solution, when a Setting is not found, all the rules under that Setting are ignored. Let us take a scenario. Let’s say you are creating a rule to check the anti virus version. So you would create a data source, setting
Posted by Sai Kodi | 2 Comments
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Friday, February 10, 2006 11:02 PM

Remotely Monitoring Servers for Compliance using the DCM Solution

Its pretty easy to get into a situation where you would like to run the DCM Solution on a server for compliance monitoring but the server which you are targeting might not have the dot net framework v 1.1 installed. The DCM Engine (command line wrapper)
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Thursday, February 09, 2006 8:09 PM

Check if Auto Update is enabled on a server using Desired Configured Monitoring Solution

This post helps you figure out how to check if Auto Update is enabled on a server! Well, Auto Update can be found in the registry at the location: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\windows\WindowsUpdate\AU . The Registry Value is NoAutoUpdate . The desired
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Attachment(s): autoupdate.xml
Wednesday, February 08, 2006 12:08 AM

DCM Command Line Wrapper Switches / Usage

The DCM Command Line Wrapper supports a few command line switches. Following are the list of supported switches for the DCM Command Line Wrapper: · -cfg (used to specify the input manifest file) · -dat (used to specify the output file) · -p (used to specify
Posted by Sai Kodi | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, February 07, 2006 10:28 AM

Compliance Checks for ranges using the Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) Solution

There might be several scenarios where you might want to check if a particular value lies within a range. Examples: Like a file version should be between 1.0.29.0 and 1.0.34.0 OR Antivirus version between 7.1 and 7.4 OR CPU processing power between 1GHz
Posted by Sai Kodi | 0 Comments
Attachment(s): range.xml
Thursday, February 02, 2006 11:31 PM

Check if Firewall is enabled on all LAN Connections using DCM Solution

This article describes how to check if Windows Firewall is enabled on all the LAN Connections on a server. I am going to make this post as short as possible but with all the required details… What to do? Check if Windows Firewall is enabled on all LAN
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Attachment(s): firewall.xml
Thursday, February 02, 2006 9:22 PM

Case Sensitiveness of Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) Solution

DCM is case-sensitive! Having said that, what aspects of DCM are case-sensitive? The tags in the xml manifest file which is created by the DCM Authoring tool are all case-sensitive. You might not be required to open up the xml file as such. But this is
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Thursday, February 02, 2006 6:52 PM

Active vs Passive Rules in Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) Solution

If you look at the Rule creation screen in the DCM Authoring tool, you will see that the DCM UI tool lets you to create two types of rules. They are the Active Rule or the Passive Rule. Now what’s the difference between these two, how can they be used
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Wednesday, February 01, 2006 8:56 PM

Why do not DCM Reports show the data from a recent run of DCM?

Well, there can be several reasons why the data is not being shown in the DCM Reports. DCM Reporting is not real-time. In this post, I am attempting to address all the valid reasons. The Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) Solution Accelerator comes
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Wednesday, February 01, 2006 6:50 PM

Check for existence of a hot fix / Service Pack with DCM Solution

How many times would you have wanted to check if a certain hot fix or a Service Pack is installed on a machine? Well it’s pretty simple to do with the DCM Solution Accelerator! This article shows you exactly how to do it. Same three questions as before
Posted by Sai Kodi | 1 Comments
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Attachment(s): hotfix.xml
Wednesday, February 01, 2006 3:47 PM

Check Service State using Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) Solution

Many a times you would have a need to check if a particular service is running. With the DCM Solution Accelerator you can create a rule to check for the status of a Service and alert if the status is not in the state you desired. I am going to show you
Posted by Sai Kodi | 0 Comments
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Attachment(s): service.xml
Wednesday, February 01, 2006 1:43 PM

Creating a Manifest with the Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) Solution

Building a manifest using the DCM Solution is pretty easy. It’s no rocket science. If you can follow the three simple steps below, you will end up building a manifest yourself within no time! Here you go… Ask yourself – What is it that I want to check
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Attachment(s): av.xml
Wednesday, February 01, 2006 11:13 AM

Are there any baseline templates for DCM?

Well, there are no baseline templates (also called configuration templates or manifests) available for the Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) Solution at this point in time. The solution has a sample built-in manifest inside it. It’s called DCM_Sample.xml.
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Wednesday, February 01, 2006 1:34 AM

Is the DCM Solution specific to Exchange?

This is one of the most frequently asked questions about the Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) Solution Accelerator. Actually, its not. You can pretty much monitor for compliance of anything and / or on any server as long as you can get hold of your
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Wednesday, February 01, 2006 7:57 AM

How to Create Rules in DCM?

Many people keep asking me about the rule creation in the DCM Solution! Hence I thought, may be if I can make this little secret public, it would be very much helpful to others! Here you go... DCM Solution supports two kinds of rules: Active Rules ( We
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Wednesday, February 01, 2006 12:40 AM

Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 Desired Configuration Monitoring

Overview Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 Desired Configuration Monitoring is a powerful solution to monitor configuration settings across all server roles and hardware types for non-compliance. Administrators can define desired configuration models
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