Best Years of Your Life
Most of my friends know that I’m a country music fan. Currently one of my favorite artists is Brad Paisley who has a song titled “Letter To Me” (lyrics and video). The first couple of lines tells what the song is about:
If I could write a letter to me
And send it back in time to myself at 17
The song explores a lot of the anxiety that many of us went through in high school. Every little thing was huge. Every setback seemed like the end of the world.
Later in the song, towards the end of the “letter” comes this line:
And I’d end by saying have no fear
These are nowhere near the best years of your life
My wife made the observation that those are words that high school students (and so many more of us) need to hear. More than that, if there was some way to convince us of it. Whatever you are going through, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Don’t settle for second best. Don’t give up. Don’t do things you will regret simply because you think everyone else is doing it.
These really aren’t the best years of your life.
Our Foreign Tooth Fairy
Today my five year old lost her first tooth. It happened really fast. When I left for work there were no loose teeth. Late morning Marybeth calls me at work to tell me that she has a “wiggly tooth”. Around 4PM she calls back to tell that the tooth is out and that the Tooth Fairy is coming tonight.
We have a special Tooth Fairy that comes to our house. Our Tooth Fairy refuses to get into competitions with the other Tooth Fairies in the neighborhood about how much a tooth is worth. Our Tooth Fairy only brings foreign money. Our oldest daughter has loved it. She has gotten coins from Africa, Belgium, Thailand, France, Argentina, Germany, and the EU. She always looks forward to finding out where the next coin will come from.
I’ll have to find out what the Tooth Fairy’s stash of foreign coins holds tonight. :-) Hmmm…I wonder if that fairy has any Hungarian Forint?
Gestational Fuel
When Julie was pregnant with our first child, the food that she most often requested was egg sandwiches. Laurel “gestated” on egg sandwiches.
With Marybeth, the gestational fuel of choice was Jr. Bacon Cheeseburgers from Wendy’s. I couldn’t even begin to tell you the number of times that I jumped in the car at odd hours to run to Wendy’s to come back with the golden food of that pregnancy.
This time around we are back to gestating on egg sandwiches. I’ve gotten pretty good at whipping one up in just a couple of minutes.
Bible Study at MMS – follow up
After my post earlier in the week about the possibility of having a Bible Study time at MMS, I got some great responses, so the Bible Study is on! For those of you who have let me know that you are interested, I will be sending you details later about what/where/when. If you are interested, but haven’t let me know so yet, please do. It will help me make sure that we have a place to meet that is adequate in size.
I want to give a big thank you to Rod Trent for mentioning the Bible Study on his blog and featuring it in the myITforum.com Daily Newsletter on April 9. That definitely helped get the word out faster than my little blog!
So…if you are interested or would like more information about the Bible Study, send me a message. If you know of others who will be at MMS and might be interested in the Bible Study, please let them know about it and have them contact me.
Add domain user to local administrators group
As part of the SCCM system that I am implementing, I am trying to streamline and automate as many functions as possible. I currently have an SCCM Task Sequence set up that can run a complete computer install (partition disk, format, install Vista, apply device drivers, install programs, install updates, etc) with no administrative input. One aspect that I am not able to automate is adding the domain user to the local administrators group on the workstation. I don’t want to use Group Policy to add a group…I don’t want everyone to be an admin on all workstations. I want to limit it to just the user being an admin of their single computer.
I had hunted for a way to do this in as fast a way as possible, which rules out using the GUI…it needs to be scripted. I tried it in VBscript, but simply could not get it to successfully add a user who was in a sub-domain. It would work for the top domain, but not for the sub-domain.
So I switched my thought process to PowerShell. I don’t know that I will ever go back. I had a working script in probably ten minutes. I then modified it and gave it some better logic, but even that went quickly. Honestly, the part that took the longest was learning the syntax for PowerShell. The script is below. You can also download it here. (PDF…my hosting provider doesn’t allow script or txt file uploads.)
###################################################################
# Name: Add2Admin.ps1
# Author: Jarvis Davis
# Company: Campus Crusade for Christ
# Creation Date: April 2, 2008
#
# Purpose: To quickly and easily add/remove a domain user to/from
# the local administrators group on a computer
#
# Inputs: It accepts the first four strings after the script name
# and puts them into variables Continue reading
Bible Study or Prayer Time at MMS?
Over the last couple of years I have made contact with quite a few people in the SMS/SCCM community who have let me know that they are a Christians. Typically the conversation came up when they found out that I work for a non-profit ministry.
Last year at MMS I wondered if there would be any interest in having a Bible Study or prayer time during MMS, and wanted to throw out this idea to see who would be interested, and if so what type of time people would be interested in. Right now the idea is really wide open. Some ideas of what it could be…
- A daily 15-30 minute Bible Study (before breakfast maybe?). I could adapt the material that I have been teaching at my church on the book of Philemon.
- A single longer Bible study at some point during the week.
- Daily short prayer time.
- Any other time for the above that could work with the really busy MMS schedule.
So…what level of interest and availability would you have for something like that? Let me know via my contact form, and I will gather the responses and send out an email to let you know what (if anything) we will end up doing.
[Update: The Bible Study will be happening. Check out this update. I still need to know if you are interested so that I can arrange for the proper size place for us to meet.]
Why didn’t we ask for prayer sooner?
Last Friday we posted asking for prayer because of Julie’s extreme morning sickness. First of all…DON’T stop praying! Second…thank you. We should have asked for prayer sooner…one of these days I will get it through my head that prayer should be my first response instead of my last.
People started praying on Friday, and on Saturday morning Julie was able to eat a full breakfast…heck that was the first full meal she had eaten all week. She was able to leave the house for the first time in four days that afternoon. She was even able to go to church on Sunday (where we got to tell our LIFE Group that I teach). She is doing a lot better, but everything is still very tentative. We don’t think she is out of the woods, but we are hopeful.
Thank you again for talking with God on our behalf.
Babies on Airplanes
When we started letting people know that Julie is pregnant I knew that it is news that could be received with difficulty by a few of our friends who have struggled with infertility. I have since talked personally with both of these guys…both are truly happy for us. At church this morning I was talking with one of them…a guy who has been told by his doctor that he and his wife will never be able to have children.
During our conversation he mentioned being on an airplane last year in which there were a couple of small children who were making normal baby noises. One of the men sitting close to him grumbled something about crying children on airplanes. My friend turned to the guy and said something that gave him a little perspective…it went something like this:
When the doctor tells you that you will never hear those sounds in your house…those sounds become the most precious in the world.
My friend’s words gave the guy a little perspective, and he stopped grumbling. I am generally very sympathetic towards parents with children on airplanes. I’ve been in that spot. As much as you want to do your best to keep your child from disturbing other people…you only have just so much control…the child has a mind and a will of their own.
I will also add that as a traveler, I always go prepared. I travel with my noise canceling headphones and a set of foam earplugs in my computer bag. Normally I use the headphones because it cancels out the engine roar and makes for a more pleasant flight. However…I always have the earplugs as a backup…just in case I am right next to a child whose ears are hurting due to air pressure changes.
New Blog Theme
For those of you who are regular visitors to my blog, you will notice that it has a different look. I chose a different theme and modified the widgets in the sidebars. Also changed the Suicide Resources page from a separate page to a post. Generally did some visual housecleaning.
Let me know what you think about the changes. I’m interested to hear.
Our Little Surprise
A little more than a month ago I came home from work and was talking with my wife about what had gone on that day. In the midst of the conversation she said that she felt like something was poking her through her clothes and asked me to look to see if I could find what it was. When I started looking I saw this:
That picture may not mean much to some of you. It’s a pair of “precious feet“…a lapel pin the same size and shape of a baby’s feet at 10 weeks after conception. Julie had used this same pin to tell me that we were pregnant with our youngest daughter. To quote my friend Jason, “Holy Schnikey!”
Now I know what some of you are thinking…I thought Jarvis said they weren’t going to have any more children. Well…what I actually said was that since our first two children didn’t sleep through the night til they were almost two years old (and sleep deprivation is a very effective form of torture…even if inflicted by a small child), God would have to speak very clearly for us to have another child…birth control would have to fail. Uh…well…God spoke.
Julie is currently 8 weeks pregnant, and we are still a bit shellshocked. This little one is definitely a surprise. We are adjusting to the fact that our family size is going to increase around the beginning of November or so. It still hardly seems real except that Julie is experiencing the worst “morning sickness” that she has ever had. BTW…has there ever been a bigger misnomer? “Morning” sickness? Please. I beg you…give us sickness that is just in the morning. This stuff is “24-hour-a-day-sickness.” And it is killing us.
We were originally planning to keep the pregnancy a secret for a bit longer, but at this point we really need your prayers. This sickness is brutal…on Julie and the rest of the family. Because the sickness has been so strong, Julie has barely been able to get off the couch most days which means that she hasn’t been able to do the things that she normally does around the house…so those things fall to me after I come home from work. We are both simply exhausted. I don’t know that I can remember a time when I have felt more fatigued.
So, please pray for us. Specifically you can pray for:
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Safety/health for our baby. While we have been too sick/tired to be joyful yet, we are looking forward to meeting this little person and want the best for whoever he/she may be.
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For the sickness to let up soon. Like I said…this is killing us.
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For strength for me as I try to be both Dad and Mom to our two daughters (who are eight and five years old). I am desperately trying to not let my tiredness bleed over into being impatient/snappy with them. Some days I do well…some days I don’t.
Vista Logon Scripts – Launchapp.wsf
After switching to Vista (18 months ago…beta 2), I realized that my logon script wasn’t running anymore, but I didn’t really pay attention to it until this week…I’m needing to roll out Vista computers to some users at the office…so I need the logon scripts to work. In doing some research I found out why they don’t work. I won’t do a full write up of the reason, but basically it has to do with User Account Control and whether or not the user is a local admin on the computer. You can read a decent description of the issue here.
To get the logon script to work in this instance, you need to use a script named launchapp.wsf (scroll all the way to the bottom of that link) that you can get from the Technet site. That script is one that you use to launch your logon script. It schedules the script to run as a task as the interactive user. It works well…but there are a few issues that I read about and experienced personally.
First, launchapp.wsf does not work for an XP client. So…if a user logs in on a Vista computer and an XP computer…the logon script will work on one or the other…but not both. Or if you are using a GPO to assign your logon script, then it will only work for either XP computers or Vista computers.
Second, if you run multiple scripts (or the same script multiple times), the first will run, but the others will fail. This is because launchapp.wsf creates a scheduled task with a name of “Launch App As Interactive User”. It fails because it can’t create the second task with the same name.
So, I set out to fix those two issues. First, let me say that I am not a great scripter. I understand VBScript. I can write it…I’m not great, but I am adequate. One aspect of script writing that I am very good at is copying something that someone else wrote and massaging it to fit my purpose. That is what I did to fix these problems…a combination of massaging others’ code and writing some of my own.
To fix the issue of launchapp not working with XP, I added a section of code that determines the OS. If the OS is XP, it runs the logon script normally. If it is Vista, it runs it via scheduling the task.
Fixing the multiple scripts / multiple runs issue was more difficult. What I was able to deduce is that the issue is a missing setting in the original launchapp.wsf that you can copy off of the Technet site. Basically when the task is scheduled, it doesn’t expire. I dug through and found the property to set (EndBoundary). I set the script to make the task expire in two minutes. To do that I had to find a way of adding two minutes to the current time and format the date/time to fit the way that EndBoundary requires. Once adding that to the launchapp script, it wasn’t a problem.
You can download my modified version of Launchapp (PDF…my hosting provider restricts what kind of files I can upload…TXT is not one of them.). The pages that I used as reference material, or that I copied code from can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Let me know if it helps or if you have suggestions of how to improve it.
Covenant Eyes Crashing
I heard back from Covenant Eyes about the crashes that I had been experiencing. This is an issue that was introduced with an upgrade that they released on January 17. They are still working on fixing the issue, but they did send me a link to be able to download the prior version. The version that introduced the crashing issue is 4.2.7c. I have downgraded CE to version 4.2.6b which was working without crashes.
If you have been having issues with CE crashing, not staying logged on, etc, you might want to try uninstalling the current version and using 4.2.6b until they resolve the issues. They will email me when they get the issue resolved, and I will post here again.
Microsoft Management Summit 2008
I totally forgot to post this a few weeks ago…I was pretty much laser focused on SCCM implementation at the time…but I found out that I am going to get to go to MMS this year! I went to MMS in 2006 and 2007 in San Diego, and it is hands down the best technical conference I have ever been to. I was concerned because our training budget got slashed this year, but I was able to persuade those who control the $$$ that this is critical to the success of some of the direction that we are heading. Basically I know that I am weak in a couple of areas that we are going to be rapidly moving into, and I will be able to get excellent instruction in these areas at MMS.
To say that I am excited is an understatement. I’m not all that enthusiastic about where it is being held this year (Vegas), but I will get access to probably the best training available, and will get to spend time with a couple of really good friends as well.
Silent VPN Auto Installer
Years ago a co-worker worked on creating an EXE that we could distribute that would set up a VPN connection for our users in an unattended fashion…no user input other than to click “Yes” and to acknowledge the completion notice.
Well I’ve been looking for a way to make that auto installer completely silent. Because it is a user based setting, I can’t throw it into my SCCM Task Sequence. It needs to run after a user logs in. But I don’t want the user to see it run. It needs to run silently in the background…no user intervention at all.
I knew that Philip had used the Connection Manager Administration Kit (CMAK) to create the original EXE. The auto installer includes a batch file that I co-wrote back in 2000 to remove any HOSTS file entries for our e-mail server as well as another batch file that modifies the routing table. It’s a pretty slick little file. If it didn’t resolve someone’s VPN issue, then there was something else wrong with their computer or internet connection.
When you run CMAK, it creates a folder that contains any files that you added to the package (the batch files I mentioned, logo/icon files, etc), the EXE that is the file you can distribute (named according to what you called the connection profile), and several settings files (.CMP, .CMS, .INF, .SED…also named according to the connection profile).
But…how to make it silent? I finally found the info in an entry in the help file for CMAK. It was buried down in a section of the help file titled, “Including Connection Manager in custom applications.” The syntax listed there is:
ServiceProfileFileName.exe [/q:a] /c:”cmstp.exe ServiceProfileFileName.inf [Parameters]”
Since I am wanting it to be completely silent, and not include a shortcut to the connection on the desktop, this is my command line to throw into SCCM:
VPN.exe /q:a /c:”cmstp.exe VPN.inf /s /ns”
Works like a charm.
Panda Antivirus Rant
I’ve made no secret that I dislike our corporate anti-virus software. Had a really good conversation with our guy who manages the system yesterday (Jeff), and he isn’t completely happy with it either…he just ran out of time to evaluate other options before the contract was going to expire and needed to be renewed.
Anyway, I just found out from Jeff that Panda removed the silent install switch from the installer. They did WHAT? For IT guys installing software on lots of machines…the silent install switch is a must. We use it to be able to install software in the background with no user interaction. This makes it easy for us to scale a deployment…to automate it so that we can push the installer to a large number of computers at once without having to be concerned about whether a user sees what is going on or not.
And Panda removed that option. Lovely. Let me add it to my growing list of reasons I dislike Panda Anti-virus.
Vista Reliability Monitor Stopped Working
One nice feature that I have enjoyed in Vista is the Reliability Monitor. (Press the Windows key and start typing “reliability” in the “start search” area on the Start Menu. Then click on Reliability Monitor.) This feature will give you a history of how stable/unstable your computer has been. It will list success and failures per day for each of the following categories:
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Software Installs and Uninstalls
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Application Failures
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Hardware Failures
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Windows Failures
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Miscellaneous Failures
This is great for troubleshooting what is going right/wrong with a computer. In particular…have you ever asked a user whose computer is going nuts the question, “Have you installed anything recently?” Of course their answer is always, “No.” Well…open up Reliability Monitor to find out the real answer. Hmmm…it looks like right about the time you started having problems that you installed WeatherBug. “Oh yeah…I forgot about that one.”
I have been using Reliability Monitor to watch a couple of troublesome apps that I have running on my computer. I’ve watched my reliability index drop from 9+ down to a low of 2.92. I’m having issues with our corporate antivirus (Panda…stay away from it in my opinion.) as well as Covenant Eyes. CE worked great up until an update that they pushed out in mid-January. It’s been crashing a lot since then…frequent instances of nmSvc.exe stopping working. They had an incremental upgrade today…hopefully that will resolve the issues.
Anyway…I’ve been monitoring that, but when I checked the chart this morning, I noted that there had been no updates in the last seven days. Hmm…that’s odd…so I started digging. One of my first stops was to look at the System Event Log to see if there were any errors related to Reliability Monitor. Instead what I got was a message that it couldn’t read the data in the event log. For all appearances, it appeared that the event log is corrupt.
After choosing to clear the event log (without saving changes…it wouldn’t let me because of invalid data), I kicked off the RACAgent task (Task Scheduler, Task Scheduler Library, Microsoft, Windows, RAC…change view to show hidden tasks). When I went back into the Reliability Monitor I could now see the data for the last week.
That is a bit odd/frustrating…instead of reporting that in the monitor as an error, it gacked and hung the monitor.
OS for SCCM Install – revisited
Last October I gathered a lot of info about whether it was better to install SCCM on a 32 bit or 64 bit OS. My post at that time concluded that installing on 64 bit was possibly the better choice, and that was the direction that I went.
Over the last weekend while I was in Bristol with Tim, we got to discussing this issue. He had just uploaded a post to his blog reversing his original opinion that x64 was the best route. His post had some pretty good reasoning in it…in particular the fact that when monitoring SCCM using SCOM, the “SCOM agent will not be able to correctly monitor the 32 bit SCCM processes running on the x64 system.”
Wonderful. At this point, we don’t have SCOM set up in our environment, but I know it is coming. I will probably be looking into transitioning my SCCM install off of the x64 OS as a result. I’m currently downloading the ISO for Windows Server 2008 (32 bit) from our MVLS site. Not a major rush because of monitoring, but I would rather go ahead and make this transition before I move the rest of our clients (approximately 900 workstations) from our SMS 2003 system over to SCCM.
This will also allow me to do a real world test of my disaster recovery plan for my SCCM environment.
Light in the Darkness
This morning I was on a flight from Asheville, NC to Atlanta that left at 6:00AM. Somewhere in the middle of the flight I looked out the window and saw that there was a light low cloud cover. Through the clouds you could see where cities were by the glowing orb beneath the clouds. Everything else was dark, but the cities were clearly visible in the midst of the darkness.
Now, the city was not just one big light. The glow that cut through the clouds was produced by hundreds of thousands of little lights working together. Each of them gave light to the area around them. Together they were able to overpower the darkness and be seen from miles away.
We live in a dark world. Jesus compared us with lights. He encouraged us to live in such a way that those around us would see the good things that we do and give glory to God. We can each bring some brightness to the part of the world that we are in. And as we do that, our collective brightness will cut through the fog and clouds to be seen by all.
The job of a light is to cut through the darkness so that people can see. Are you doing your job today?
Verbalprocessor.com
For anyone who read my post on Network Solutions being evil…they finally released the hold on my preferred domain and I was able to purchase it this week. If you are viewing this in a web browser, you can see that you are now on verbalprocessor.com instead of verbalprocess.wordpress.com. Both will continue to work, although the wordpress.com one is simply a pointer to verbalprocessor.com.
If you are seeing this in an RSS feed, update your feed URL to verbalprocessor.com/feed.
Tennis Match on Steroids
Watching the NASCAR race at Bristol is fun…but also challenging. There are so many cars in such a small space. And because it only takes about 3-5 laps for the leaders to start lapping the slowest cars, it gets very confusing very fast to know where the leaders are because they are interspersed with lapped traffic all the way around the track. Your head is snapping back and forth the entire race…kinda like at a tennis match…except there is action to be watched at both ends the entire time.
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The Realm of the Verbal Processor 