This week I’ve been beating on a problem with an OSD Task Sequence. It is a TS for deploying the Vista image that I build with my Build and Capture TS. What I was noticing was that in my Deploy TS, it was simply taking entirely too long to download the WIM file. Now granted it is a 3.5gig file, but it was taking approximately 15 minutes to download. With the gigabit connection, it should have been about a minute and a half. WHY???

I enabled command support on my boot image, ran the TS, and pulled up an F8 CMD prompt to take a look at the smsts.log. It has some errors where the HTTP transport was failing with a 405 code. After failing three times, it then switched to SMB and proceeded to download…very slowly. Here is what I saw in the log:

Initializing HTTP transport.

   Setting URL = http://SCCMfqdn/SMS_DP_SMSDPE$/SMSPKG/SMS00024/.

   Address = SCCMfqdn, Object = /SMS_DP_SMSDPE$/SMSPKG/SMS00024/, Port = 12345.

WinHttp credentials set

CLibSMSMessageWinHttpTransport::Send: URL:

          SCCMfqdn:12345  PROPFIND /SMS_DP_SMSDPE$/SMSPKG/SMS00024/

Error. Status code 405 returned

dwHttpResultCode>=200 && dwHttpResultCode<=299, HRESULT=80004005 (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\framework\tscore\downloadcontent.cpp,590)

Http result: 405

SendResourceRequest() failed with 0×80004005

SendResourceRequest(), HRESULT=80004005 (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\framework\tscore\downloadcontent.cpp,371)

oDavRequest.GetDirectoryListing(setDirs, setFiles), HRESULT=80004005 (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\framework\tscore\resolvesource.cpp,2419)

Retrying download…

Tried all the available http based locations. SMB based locations will be attempted now.

So…what is that 405 code all about? It’s an HTTP code for “Method not allowed”. I ended up finding a page that explained that this meant that the HTTP verb (GET, POST, etc) wasn’t allowed. So…what verb was it looking for? PROPFIND. That led me to a search on the TechNet ConfigMgr forum for “propfind” which pulled up this thread. It wasn’t my exact scenario, but it fit close enough to try. The gist is that there is a line that needs to be in the applicationhost.config file to tell WEBDAV to handle the PROPFIND (and other) verbs. The line is (all on one line…be careful of smart vs. straight quotes):

<add name=”WebDAV” path=”*” verb=”PROPFIND,PROPPATCH,MKCOL,PUT,COPY,DELETE,MOVE,LOCK,UNLOCK” modules=”WebDAVModule” resourceType=”Unspecified” requireAccess=”None” />

After putting that line in the file, stopping ConfigMgr, stopping IIS, replacing the file, and starting everything back up…ConfigMgr got very angry with me. The MP was really ticked. It was officially refusing to do anything. So…I replaced my modified file with the original that I had copied elsewhere. Everything was happy again…but still slow.

A bit later my friend Tim called. I ran it by him, and he gave me the extra couple of bits of information that the TechNet thread was missing. The line that needs to be added to the applicationhost.config file is the right line…but instead of being added in five places as mentioned in the TechNet thread, it needs to be added in nine places…all nine of the “<handlers></handlers>” sections. Also…it needs to be added before the “StaticFile” handler line in each of those sections…so each of the “handlers” sections should end looking like this (three lines…depending on how much this wraps in your browser):

<add name=”WebDAV” path=”*” verb=”PROPFIND,PROPPATCH,MKCOL,PUT,COPY,DELETE,MOVE,LOCK,UNLOCK” modules=”WebDAVModule” resourceType=”Unspecified” requireAccess=”None” />

<add name=”StaticFile” path=”*” verb=”*” modules=”StaticFileModule,DefaultDocumentModule,DirectoryListingModule” resourceType=”Either” requireAccess=”Read” />

</handlers>

After putting that in place, the HTTP transport worked, and the download took the minute and a half that I expected it to take. The smsts.log looks like this instead:

Initializing HTTP transport.

Setting URL = http://SCCMfqdn/SMS_DP_DP$/SMSPKG/SMS00024/.

Address = SCCMfqdn, Object = /SMS_DP_DP$/SMSPKG/SMS00024/, Port = 12345.

WinHttp credentials set

CLibSMSMessageWinHttpTransport::Send: URL: SCCMfqdn:12345 PROPFIND /SMS_DP_DP$/SMSPKG/SMS00024/

Error. Status code 207 returned

List of files to be downloaded

Directory: http://SCCMfqdn:12345/SMS_DP_DP$/SMSPKG/SMS00024/

File: http://SCCMfqdn:12345/SMS_DP_DP$/SMSPKG/SMS00024/xyzabc.wim

GetDirectoryListing() successfully completed

Succeeded loading resource DLL ‘X:\sms\bin\i386\1033\TSRES.DLL’

Executing command line: X:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /k

The command completed successfully.

Successfully launched command shell.

Downloaded file from http://SCCMfqdn:12345/SMS_DP_DP$/SMSPKG/SMS00024/xyzabc.wim to C:\_SMSTaskSequence\Packages\SMS00024\xyzabc.wim

Download done setting progress bar to 100

It is much happier and faster…and I’m much happier.

The Realm of the Verbal Processor has been on mute for the last week. We got an early morning phone call on Sunday June 29. Julie’s grandmother died. We were able to get reasonable flights to PA the same day (and Julie’s grandfather offered to pay for the flight). Grandma was 85. She and Grampa had been married for 64 years. They had been dating since they were both 14 years old. Needless to say, this had been really rough on him losing his sweetheart of the last 71 years.

In a brief conversation with Grampa this week, he mentioned that they had grown a lot closer after they retired to Florida 25 years ago. What struck me was that after 40 years of marriage (25 years ago), they grew significantly closer in years 41-64 of their marriage. That is really cool…something that Julie and I aspire to. For that matter, we have a great marriage legacy in our families. Thinking about that prompted me to write the post just below this one.

Grandma will be missed. It is only just becoming “real” to Julie. It hit pretty hard yesterday…capped off by a birthday card last night. My birthday is June 30…the day after Grandma died. They had already sent me a birthday card…it was in Grandma’s handwriting. With our traveling to the funeral over the last week, I didn’t open it until last night. Seeing her Grandma’s handwriting on my card tipped things over the edge for Julie last night. It’s very possible that this was the last birthday card she mailed.

That Sunday morning when we told my five year old that Grandma had died, she had this very brief look of shock and horror and then quickly recovered and said, “We won’t get to see Grandma any more til we get to heaven. So when we go to Grandma and Grampa’s house, we’ll only see Grampa? So now Grandma gets to see the fence?”

Julie was a little confused at first until she realized what Marybeth was talking about. “You mean the one with the pearls?” “Yeah…that one.” Then Marybeth started talking about all the things that Grandma gets to do now. She wrapped up with this (in what is a typical stream of consciousness conversation with MB): “It’s very sad for us that we won’t get to see Grandma for a long time til we get to heaven. We’ll get to see her when we go to heaven, but I don’t think God wants me to go to heaven when I’m five…when I’m a grown up. Then some day we’ll all get to go be in heaven, and there won’t be any more earth, and it will be great because no one will have to die any more.”

She just had a perfect balance of appropriate sadness because we will miss Grandma mixed with appropriate joy at recognizing that death is not the end of things. She even got the end of things right. I’m not sure how she knew this because I haven’t been teaching her any lessons from Revelation, but she nailed it.

It has occurred to me a few times that Julie and I come from a tremendous legacy of long marriages.

Both of my sets of grandparents celebrated 55 years of marriage before my grandfathers passed away. Until last week, all four of Julie’s grandparents were still living…and both sets were approaching 65 years of marriage. My parents…nearly 21 years before my dad passed away when I was 12. Julie’s parents…more than 35 years and going strong. Julie and I will hit 13 years in August. We are in really good company…and proof that marriage not only CAN work…it can work well.

Not all of those 300+ years of marriage were easy ones. Just speaking from my own experience, somewhere around years 7-9 were tough for Julie and I…mainly as a result of me working through some anger issues in my life. But during those rough times, Julie and I never considered bailing on the marriage. Our commitment to each other from the beginning was that our marriage is for life. That is the way that God designed it…I’m not going to argue with him about it. I committed that as long as Julie and I were alive, we are together. That commitment was to her, but more importantly, that commitment was made to God at our wedding. He is the one who prepared each of us for the other.

And what we have seen is that our relationship with each other just continues to grow stronger. The rough times have actually helped our relationship to deepen. No doubt that the rough times were not fun…they definitely were not. But without the conflict, our relationship would not be as strong as it is.

Without further ado, here is the final part of the interview with Wally Mead. A lot of you have enjoyed this series, and I’ve been glad to be able to bring it to you. 

Be sure to check back soon for the next interview. I’m not sure which one will be next, but I’ve already lined up two guys in the SMS community that I know you won’t want to miss.

Yeah, that’s meant to be a teaser. It’s my blog…I can do that! :-)

So, enjoy Part 3 of the Wally interview and check back soon to find out who my next interview is going to be!

Yesterday Rod Trent linked to an article on Robert Hensing’s blog about a less than well researched article in USA Today about Firefox 3. When I went to the site, I saw Robert’s blog’s tag line…”Home of the ‘Fail Open Goat’ Award”. That got me curious, so I searched his blog to find out what it was about. That brought me to this page on Robert’s blog.

There is a breed of goats called myotonic goats. They have a genetic abnormality that causes their muscles to lock up when they are frightened, startled, or excited. The effect it has is that their legs get stiff, and they typically fall over on their sides. They recover after a few seconds and everything is normal…until they are startled or excited again. It’s actually pretty funny to watch.

To quote Robert on his blog, “I call them “fail open goats” because, well, that’s what it reminds me of whenever I see one . . . a goat . . . failing . .. open.” He created the “Fail Open Goat” award to acknowledge instances of product security failure.

All last night and after waking up this morning, I am walking around chuckling at the phrase, “a goat…failing…open.” I just can’t stop laughing about it. So…watch the video below, and think about that phrase every time one falls over…especially when the entire herd falls over after having an umbrella waved at them. You just might start walking around muttering “a goat…failing…open”.

I have been more than a bit annoyed with the MP on my SCCM server. I have SCCM SP1 running on Server 2008. It is also using a remote SQL server that is running on Server 2003 x64 edition. In looking at the component status, it shows up as a fat red X. Looking further in, the problem is on the SMS_MP_CONTROL_MANAGER component. Every 60 minutes I have a message that comes up in that component stating:

MP Control Manager detected MP is not responding to HTTP requests.  The http error is 12029.

I was able to connect directly to the MP in my web browser by going to http://SCCMfqdn/SMS_MP/.sms_aut?MPLIST. When I do that, I get a list that includes the name of my MP. But I still have that pesky message. Then I took a look at the MPcontrol.log. It was full of error messages also…but this one gave me the clue to the problem. The messages repeat every five minutes, and they follow this pattern:

Call to HttpSendRequestSync failed for port 12345 with an error code.

Http test request failed, error code is 12029.

Successfully performed Management Point availability check against local computer.

That is the problem…it is attempting to connect on the custom port that I set up for client requests, but is failing. A quick check of trying to connect via http://SCCMfqdn:12345/SMS_MP/.sms_aut?MPLIST confirms it…it can’t connect. The root problem is that the Management Point availability check is attempting to connect to the MP over the custom port, but IIS doesn’t know what to do with requests that come in on that port.

So…open up the IIS Manager, click on Sites, the right click on Default Web Site, and choose “Edit Bindings…”. Click “Add…” and enter the custom port information. Close everything out, and the MP is much happier…and so am I. The next time it does its availability check it comes through as:

Call to HttpSendRequestSync succeeded for port 12345 with status code 200, text: OK
Http test request succeeded.
Successfully performed Management Point availability check against local computer.

Here is part two of my interview with Wally Mead. This section is a bit shorter than the first one…in the flow of the questions this just seemed like the best place to break it up. I plan to post the third and final part of the interview next Tuesday, so be sure to check back for the final ten minutes.

My plan is to do some more of these personal type interviews, so I posed a question yesterday…who would you like to see interviewed? Joey started off a fantastic list of people. (He also emailed me offline saying that he would be impressed if I got his whole list…heck…I’ll be impressed if I get half of his list! Although I do already have one of those lined up!) I’d love to hear from you who you would like to know more about. So…go to the post and leave a comment voting for who you would like. If the person is already mentioned, feel free to throw in another vote for them.

But…without further rambling by me…heeeeeeeerree’sss Wally!

Back in October 2007 when I was doing my original Pilot deployment of SCCM (RTM), I posted on the TechNet forums asking questions about whether putting the site database on a SQL cluster that was running on the Itanium (IA64) architecture was a supported installation scenario. Stan White replied back that both clustered as well as Itanium were supported. After installing, everything was working fine…no problems worth mentioning.

Fast forward seven months. I’m in the midst of my SCCM rebuild. I’m doing so on Server 2008 and SCCM SP1. Everything appeared to be working except that the SMS_SITE_SQL_BACKUP component refused to install on the SQL server. In the sitecomp.log file was the following message (only three lines out of a couple of hundred log entries):

Server’s platform type is X86

…

Could not get entry point file name from SMS installation map.

Installation failed and will be retried in the next polling cycle

This repeated every 60 minutes, but would never install. The fact that it saw the platform as x86 instead of IA64 was an immediate red flag. After posting this scenario (with complete log files) on the TechNet forum, I waited. And waited. And cross posted. And finally got a response this morning. Turns out that they had to do a bit of research to find the answer. Here is the answer from Jeff Nordrum (one of the Microsoft moderators on the forum):

Sorry for the slow response. We needed to investigate this issue a little more thoroughly before responding. Back in August 2006, we quietly dropped official support for the SQL role on the 64 bit Itanium platform for Configuration Manager 2007. However, ConfigMgr 2007 SQL role still worked on IA64 (including SMS_SITE_SQL_BACKUP). For the development of ConfigMgr 2007 SP1, in order to support Windows 2008 64-bit, new code for SQL Backup was needed. This new code was not implemented on IA64 since it was officially not supported.

 

We apologize for the lack of clear documentation and the misunderstanding regarding what we support on IA64. We’ll get our online documentation updated as soon as possible. Moving forward, we don’t plan to include support for the SQL role on the IA64 platform for SP1 or any future releases of Configuration Manager.

So…it turns out that when I installed in October 2007, that I was in fact installing on a non-supported setup. It just didn’t come back to bite me until SP1 was released in late May. From what I’ve been told, our Itanium SQL servers are nearing end of life and are needing to be replaced, so this will be some extra motivation for us to make that happen sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I need to find another SQL box so that I can move my SCCM database.

Based solely on the number of hits that the Wally Mead interview has gotten, I would say that the SMS/SCCM community has a fair amount of interest in getting to know more about some of the people that we see on the forums or presenting at conferences. So…who would you like to see interviewed?

Leave a comment below to let me know who you’d like to hear from. If someone has already mentioned someone that you are interested in, leave a comment anyway…let it be like adding a vote. Don’t know if I will be able to make an interview happen with those that you are interested in hearing from, but I’ll do my best. Just give me ideas of who you are interested in getting to know.

Oh yeah, I will be working on cleaning up the second part of the Wally interview and hopefully posting it later this week. Check back to hear it…or subscribe to my RSS feed to be automatically alerted.

Over the last several months I’ve developed a relationship with Wally Mead. Wally is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft where he works with the System Center Configuration Manager product team. He handled a bug report that I submitted about SCCM (here and here…bug was fixed in SP1) and we connected offline afterwards. He had seen in the bug submission that I work for Campus Crusade for Christ, and he has had interaction with CCC in the past.

This week Wally has been in Orlando at Tech-Ed, so I invited him to come out and let me take him on a tour of CCC’s headquarters. After the tour we sat down and Wally allowed me to interview him. Below is the first portion of the interview. I will post parts 2 and 3 sometime next week.

I’d like to also offer a public thank you to Wally for taking the time to sit down with me. It was a very enjoyable time, and if Chris ends up coming to UCF, I look forward to seeing you more often!

Another thing…who else would you like to see interviewed? Let me know on that page and I’ll see what I can do.

Enjoy!

Part 2 of the interview is live now…

[Update 6-22-08: It was brought to my attention in the comments below that if you don't have the Adobe Flash Plugin on your computer, you will not see the audio player that is just below the "Enjoy!" line. You can get it here if you don't already have it.]