SCCM Distribution point tar file error

I spent all weekend fighting various sccm parent-> Child site replication issues.  One I had around some of my software update packages had basically no information on the web despite what I would expect to be a very ‘searchable’ signature.  the misspelling in signature in this line:

failed to register the source with the signautre repository

The full error message I was getting is below but the most obvious lines were (from distmgr.log on the child)

invalid tar file signature
UnpackFolderW failed; 0x80040299
UnpackFolder() failed
failed to register the source with the signautre repository
UpdateStagedFolderRdcW failed; 0x80070299
Cannot copy package CEN00004 from e
Failed to copy package CEN00004 from e
STATMSG
Forward package status for pkg CEN00004 to site CEN
Error occurred.

I was stuck in a loop w/ two of my packages where they would expand to an e:\_S XXXXXXX temp directory but would fail during or just after that step w/ the above errors. 


Resolution:
Short answer:
Delete from dp, turn off binary replication, repush.

Step by step:
What finally worked was to remove the packages from the child distribution point at the parent server, turn off binary replication, and re-add them to the DP.  So, from the parent server Computer Management –> Software Updates –> Deployment Packages –> My Package –> right click on distribution points –> manage distribution points –> delete from selected.  Once I saw this go through in the distmgr log of the child site, which looks something like:  

Updated replicated package info for package CEN00004
Updated replicated package server ["Display=\\childsite\"]MSWNET
Updated replicated package program info for package CEN00004, program *, dependent program
Successfully processed C
Removing package CEN00004 from the active package array.

Right click on your package under Deployment Packages and uncheck ‘Enable Binary Replication’.
Right click on Deployment Packages –> your package –> distribution points and add a new DP.
You should see it uncompress to the _S temp folder and then continue to creating the directory structure and moving the files into your SMSPGKE$ (or whichever drive is appropriate).
Full log of the repeating (erroring) attempt below. 
Hopefully this will save somebody an afternoon.
Good luck


Starting package processing thread,thread ID = 1670
Sleep 3600 seconds...
STATMSG
Retrying package CEN00004
No action specified for the package CEN00004.
Start adding package to server ["Display=\\childsite\"]MSWNET
["Display=\\childsite\"]MSWNET
Will wait for 1 threads to end.
Thread Handle = 7056
Attempting to add or update a package on a distribution point.
for ["Display=\\childsite\"]MSWNET
STATMSG
Established connection to ["Display=\\childsite\"]MSWNET
Signature share exists on distribution point path MSWNET
Found the existing package path on MSWNET
Validating the compressed file E
Used 1 out of 7 allowed processing threads.
Sleep 3600 seconds...
The package file requires a NTFS drive to decompress to.
Decompressing package E
Processing incoming file C
Package CEN00004 is currently being processed
Processing incoming file C
Package CEN00004 is currently being processed
Used 1 out of 7 allowed processing threads.
Sleep 3600 seconds...
Used 1 out of 7 allowed processing threads.
Sleep 3600 seconds...
Used 1 out of 7 allowed processing threads.
Sleep 3600 seconds...
STATMSG
GetPackageSignature() called for package CEN00004 with version 3. UnpackedSignature = 0
RDC
for ["Display=\\childsite\"]MSWNET
IISPortsList in the SCF is "80".
IISSSLPortsList in the SCF is "443".
IISWebSiteName in the SCF is "".
IISSSLState in the SCF is 0.
Virtual Directory SMS_DP_SMSPKGE$ for the physical path E
for ["Display=\\childsite\"]MSWNET
IISPortsList in the SCF is "80".
IISSSLPortsList in the SCF is "443".
IISWebSiteName in the SCF is "".
IISSSLState in the SCF is 0.
Virtual Directory SMS_DP_SMSSIG$ for the physical path E
Get access to the package directory and the number of free bytes at that location.
Attempting to make an accessible connection to MSWNET
Established connection to MSWNET
Getting the NAL path's NOS equivalent.
The NOS path is \\childsite\SMSPKGE$\CEN00004\
Getting the number of free bytes.
The number of free K bytes 221886568
Successfully made an accessible connection, got a NOS path, and, if requested, got the number of free bytes at this location.
Attempting to make an accessible connection to MSWNET
Established connection to MSWNET
Getting the NAL path's NOS equivalent.
The NOS path is \\childsite\SMSSIG$\
The number of free bytes at the specified location has not been requested.
Successfully made an accessible connection, got a NOS path, and, if requested, got the number of free bytes at this location.
Successfully set access security on MSWNET
GetPackageSignature() called for package CEN00004 with version 3. UnpackedSignature = 0
RDC
RegisterSignatureUsage() called with for Package CEN00004, Version 3 with Targetpath as E
invalid tar file signature
UnpackFolderW failed; 0x80040299
UnpackFolder() failed
failed to register the source with the signautre repository
UpdateStagedFolderRdcW failed; 0x80070299
Cannot copy package CEN00004 from e
Failed to copy package CEN00004 from e
STATMSG
Forward package status for pkg CEN00004 to site CEN
Error occurred.
Performing error cleanup prior to returning.
DP thread with array index 0 ended.
DP thread with thread handle 7056 and thread ID 5628 ended.
Updating package info for package CEN00004
Only retrying local DP update for package CEN00004, no need to replicate package definition to child sites or DP info to parent site.
StoredPkgVersion (3) of package CEN00004. StoredPkgVersion in database is 3.
SourceVersion (3) of package CEN00004. SourceVersion in database is 3.
STATMSG
Failed to process package CEN00004 after 3 retries, will retry 97 more times

Automatically closing SCOM alerts w/ powershell

You may have seen my post earlier about Syslog Monitoring Walkthrough with Systems Center Operations Manager 2007.  Well, I went on vacation and my colleagues got a little overzealous in what we directed at scom.  I came back to over 200k warnings from one device that was sending alerts at waaaay too low a threshhold.  These were going into a view that wasn’t normally checked (it seems) and now we have a problem.  The console crashes when trying to select all of them (surprise) and I do not want to do this by hand.  Powershell to the rescue?
After opening the OpsMgr PS console, we can get started.  Setting the alert to closed (ResolutionState =255) should be trivial.  We mustn’t forget to update the alert after we set the state.  The interesting part is that we need to get our collection of alerts with as little impact as possible.
I could just do:
$colAgents = get-alert
but that would crush my database and take forever.  To narrow this down a bit, I am going to select by source (as basically all of these came from the same source.) 
We could run a get-alert | where {SOMETHING} but that would have to return all the alerts and then parse them which would be very heavy.  The SCOM cmdlets have a –criteria to do the filtering in the db, lets use that.
Source seems to translate, at an object level, to MonitoringObjectDisplayName so I set my criteria, do the query and loop through the results like so:

$criteria = “ResolutionState = 0 AND MonitoringObjectDisplayName = ‘SERVERNAME’”

$colSysLogAlerts = get-alert -criteria $criteria

foreach($Alert in $colSysLogAlerts) {

      $Alert.ResolutionState = 255

      write-host “Closing $($Alert.id)”

      $Alert.Update("Closed by Powershell")

}

Powershell to the rescue indeed.

Syslog Monitoring Walkthrough with Systems Center Operations Manager 2007

Building on excellent posts here, here and here and feedback on the forums here, I am going to describe our Operations manager 2007 syslog setup.


First step was to build a group of servers that will be our Syslog collectors in Opsmgr.  Populate your Syslog Collectors group w/ the servers you will be pointing your syslog messages towards.  I created a new management pack called _Default_Syslog that will hold all the work in this section. 



Once I have my group, I want to create a new rule.  Under the rule wizard, I select Alert Generating Rules –> Event Based-> Syslog (Alert). 

I am going to have 3 Syslog rule.  One for each state, warning, error and informational.  The first rule I am making is the error rule.  So we are going to name it, Syslog Error.  (I know, imaginative)

Since I am collecting Alerts, it seems “Alert” would be a good rule target but I will admit to being a bit hazy on this area of SCOM and what it implies.  If you know better, please let me know.

For rule target, I am just going to pick Windows Computers.  Note that at some point I tried to target this at the Agent and this caused problems when I wanted to use a Management server as a collector.  To quote Graham Davies from the System Center Operations Manager General forums:

If you want the rule to run on the RMS \ Gateway then you'll need to target the appropriate class - management server. Although the Management Servers include "agent capability", they are not agents and hence won't get the rule if you target agent.

MAKE SURE you unselect Rule is Enabled or you will turn on syslog collection for all of your servers.  We will override to turn on these rules for our specific group later.




For Event Expressions, I want to catch all events w/ a Severity of less than or equal to 3.  So I build my Filter like so:



For my alerts, I like to get more data so I am going to put the following in the description:

Facility:
$Data/EventData/DataItem/Facility$
Severity:
$Data/EventData/DataItem/Severity$
Priority:
$Data/EventData/DataItem/Priority$
Priority Name
$Data/EventData/DataItem/PriorityName$
Time Generated:
$Data/EventData/DataItem/TimeStamp$
Hostname:
$Data/EventData/DataItem/HostName$
Message:
$Data/EventData/DataItem/Message$

Click create to finish the wizard.

Repeat the above for the Warning Alerts.  You will only need to change the Name, the severity on the alert and make your Filter equal to 4 like so:



And again for your Informational alerts.  Your filter will be greater than or equal to 5 and don’t forget to change your severity.

I chose to capture these as infomational alerts for now, I am going to see how spammy this gets.  another option is to create these as Event collection rules without alerts.  That will allow you to hold on to the data but not alert on it.  It will depend on your alerting requirements.  You can also manage what you send from your sending device’s syslog configuration.

To enable these rules on specific servers, right click on your rule and choose ‘Overrides’ –> Override the Rule –> For a group…



 Select your Syslog Servers group and override the rule to enable it on these servers.



You can verify that the syslog listener is enabled by getting on the machine you expect to be listening and checking for UDP 514 in netstat.  Open a command windows and type ‘netstat –an | findstr 514’  (findstr = grep).  You want to see a line like the below.  If you don't get anything, you are not listening for syslog packets.



In order to make this easy to see, I also created a view.  Under the SCOM Console Monitoring view, find your _default_syslog folder –> right click –> New –> Alert View. Include alerts ‘created by specific sources’.  Pick your rules that you just created.





You should end up w/ a view like (your source will probably be a computer name):




More info I found two ways to display more info in the line.  The first way is the most straightforward and I typed it up first so I am going to show it anyway.  You probably want the second way.  B)
The first way:

You can add more information to your alert and then set your view to show it.  Under your alert configuration, you can add custom alert fields.  I added fields for both my hostname and my priority name.



Send a few more test syslogs.  BTW, the kiwi syslog generator works perfectly for this.  Update your view so that you show Custom Field 1 and Custom Field 2 from the Display tab under your view properties.



Note that for some reason my extra columns were not displaying initially.  I had to delete and recreate the view.  Since my source was always the same, I also stopped showing the source.  You can see the syslog entry created after the change has populated the custom fields:



The second way:

This initially involved some (simple) XML munging so I was going to have an advanced and a simple method, the simple being the one above.  Once I figured out how in the XML, it turns out you can do it in the GUI as well. 

I first exported the MP and saw the below XML

          <Name>Syslog Error</Name>
          <Description>Facility:
{0}
Severity:
{1}
Priority:
{2}
Priority Name
{3}
Time Generated:
{4}
Hostname:
{5}
Message:
{6}</Description>

Note that the curly bracked enclosed items are expanded to our variables.  So {5} is analogous to $Data/EventData/DataItem/HostName$ in our GUI based alert description.  Putting $Data/EventData/DataItem/HostName$  in the alert name doesn’t work but putting {5} does.  So I changed the XML to

          <Name>Syslog Error: {5} - {3}</Name>
          <Description>Facility:
{0}
Severity:
{1}
Priority:
{2}
Priority Name
{3}
Time Generated:
{4}
Hostname:
{5}
Message:
{6}</Description>

When I checked my alert view, voila!, My alert name has changed as in the screen shot below.  My next thought was why can’t I do that from the gui?  So, i edited my alert name to be: Syslog Warning: {5} - {3}



Back to my alert view and, check it out, useful alert names!!  Maybe I am too excited about this but it makes it much more supportable in my opinion.  B)



One note, I am putting the syslog collector on other running servers.  We have only a few devices that are sending data here and only critical events are expected.  YMMV, you may want to dedicate a server to this.

Using Powershell to create groups, populate groups and retrieve LDAP distinguished names

Update 20121203 - I just noticed this is still getting hits.  this is largely deprecated, from Powershell 2.0 and beyond, do your self a favor and use the ActiveDirectory module.  if you don't have access to that module for some reason (they do exist) the below should still work.

Update: 20100507 - updated the sam search string to do fuzzy matching.

A couple more functions I needed during a recent project.  Using powershell of course, we needed to create a group in ad in a specific OU.  We also wanted to populate that group.  To do the second, I needed a helper function to get the distinguished name of a group or user.  I leverage two main sites for most of these with some light modifications.   

For create group we pass it the name of our new group and the OU we want to create our group in, such as:

Create-group “Newgroup” “OU=ServerGroups,DC=example,DC=com”

function create-group ($groupname, $strOU) {

      $OU = [adsi]"LDAP://$strOU"

      $group = $ou.Create("Group", "CN=$groupname")

      $group.setinfo()

      $g2 = [adsi]"LDAP://CN=$groupname,$strOU"

      $g2.sAMAccountName = $groupname

      $g2.setinfo()

      Write-Host "Created $groupname in $strOU"

}

For add-usertogroup we pass it a user DN.  DNs are the full LDAP distinguished name like:

LDAP://CN=myuser,OU=Admins,DC=example,DC=com 

So we would pass something like

Add-usertogroup “LDAP://CN=myuser,OU=Admins,DC=example,DC=com” “LDAP://CN=Newgroup,OU=ServerGroups,DC=example,DC=com”

That is kind of annoying so you could also use the get-dn function below. 

The safe way:

$userDN = get-dn "myuser"

$groupDN = get-dn "newgroup"

add-usertogroup $userDN $groupDN

or the one liner

add-usertogroup (get-dn "myuser") (get-dn "newgroup")

function add-usertogroup ($userDN, $groupDN) {

      $user = [adsi]$userDN

      $group = [adsi]$groupDN

      Write-Host "Adding $($user.cn) to $($group.cn)"

      $members = $group.member

      $group.member = $members+$user.distinguishedName

      $group.setinfo()

}

I would further note this excellent site describing how to write an LDAP filter.  It cleared a few things up for me at long last.  I can’t believe I never realized that & was a logical AND...  Pretty straightforward afterwards but the writeup above helped me bridge the gap.  Note that it is for some software or other so ignore the part about escaping the special characters at the top. B)

function get-dn ($SAMName)

{

      $root = [ADSI]''

      $searcher = new-object     System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($root)

      #note: if you don't want fuzzy searches, remove the *s from the line below.  
      #this will force a match of the search string only - thanks jc for the tip
      $searcher.filter = "(&(|(objectClass=user)(objectClass=group))(sAMAccountName=*$SAMName*))"

      $user = $searcher.findall()

      if ($user.count -gt 1)

      {   

            $count = 0

            foreach($i in $user)

            {

            write-host $count ": " $i.path

            $count = $count + 1

      }

    $selection = Read-Host "Please select item: "

      return $user[$selection].path

      } else {

      return $user[0].path

      }

}

Note that it matches the SAM Account Name (aka the ‘Pre-Windows 2000’ name in the AD snapin)

Enjoy

Use powershell to quickly backup all TFS Work Item Types

Hey all,
Just a quickie to easily backup all your current work items from all projects in Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1.  I wanted to do this ahead of a big migration and I am adverse to manual labor.

It starts w/ a function i found a couple years ago.  I don’t recall where or I would give credit here.  It is very useful for any tfs powershell manipulation.

Edit below to enter your $TFSHost and update your path if necessary.  I recommend running from a blank directory.  It will create a directory for each project and export each WIT for that project to the respective directories.

Update: I added another function from my library test-win32 and had that manage the default paths for x64 and x86 archs.


Good luck

$tfshost = "thshost"

 

function Test-Win32() {

    return [IntPtr]::size -eq 4

}

if (test-win32) {

      $tfstoolspath = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE"

} else {

      $tfstoolspath = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE"

}

function get-tfs {

      #10-08 - cornasdf - i stole this from the web but this is a great way to connect to TFS

      # in your code you use: $tfs =  get-tfs $TFSHost

      #some quick examples from resolvedticketsmail.ps1:

      #get select from Stored query

      #$query = $tfs.WIT.Projects[$ProjectHoldingQuery].StoredQueries | where{$_.Name -eq $QueryViewName}

      #get results of specified query

      #$oldTickets = $tfs.WIT.Query($query.QueryText)

      param(

            [string] $serverName = $(throw 'serverName is required')

      )

      begin

      {

            # load the required dll

            [void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client")

            $propertiesToAdd = (

                  ('VCS', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.VersionControlServer'),

                  ('WIT', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.WorkItemStore'),

                  ('CSS', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.ICommonStructureService'),

                  ('GSS', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.IGroupSecurityService')

            )

      }

      process

      {

            # fetch the TFS instance, but add some useful properties to make life easier

            # Make sure to "promote" it to a psobject now to make later modification easier

            [psobject] $tfs = [Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.TeamFoundationServerFactory]::GetServer($serverName)

            foreach ($entry in $propertiesToAdd) {

                  $scriptBlock = '

                        [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("{0}") > $null

                        $this.GetService([{1}])

                  ' -f $entry[1],$entry[2]

                  $tfs | add-member scriptproperty $entry[0] $ExecutionContext.InvokeCommand.NewScriptBlock($scriptBlock)

            }

            return $tfs

      }

}    

$tfs = get-tfs $tfshost

$projects = $tfs.wit.Projects

foreach ($proj in $projects) {

      if ( -not (Test-Path -path .\$($proj.Name))) {

            New-Item .\$($proj.Name) -type directory

      }

     

      foreach ($wit in $proj.WorkItemTypes) {

            "Exporting $($proj.Name) : $($wit.Name) -> .\$($proj.Name)\$($wit.Name).xml"

            & "$tfstoolspath\witexport.exe"  /p "$($proj.Name)" /n "$($wit.Name)" /f ".\$($proj.Name)\$($wit.Name).xml" /t $tfshost

           

      }

}

Systems Center Operations Manager R2 CU1 Issues and command line update

Just a quick one on our recent opsmgr R2 CU1 update. 

Kevin Holman has a good post about his experiences.  Start here.  I would add the below

1.  The gateway update does not copy the update msp to the agentmanagement folder.  Due to this, when I approved updates for agents on the other side of a gateway, they did not get the update.  You could fix this by copying the files from your gateway server before you approve your pending agent updates.  Copy the files at c:\Program Files\System Center 2007 R2 Hotfix Utility\KB974144\agent to the appropriate directory under c:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\AgentManagement.  Make sure you copy the x86 update to the x86 folder.  x64 goes in AMD64 and ia64 goes in ia64.

2.  Only remotely managed agents will offer an update.  In my case, my only agents that were manually installed were due to troubleshooting or other issues.  Another solution from Kevin Holman shows how to reset your agents to be remotely managed.  Pay attention to the whole post to make sure it is right for you.

3.  If you didn’t realize your gateways were not updated (like me) or put in the wrong password for one of your domains, you may need to update manually.  You can go on each server and run the installer and then choose install agent but that seemed annoying.  You can do it from the server over the network w/:

"\\GATEWAYSERVER\c$\Program Files\System Center 2007 R2 Hotfix Utility\KB974144\SetupUpdateOM.exe" /silent /x86msp:KB974144-x86.msp /amd64msp:KB974144-x64.msp /UpdateAgent

4.  or you can do what I did and psexec it w/:

psexec -u DOMAIN\user "\\comp1,comp2,compN" cmd /c "\\GATEWAYSERVER\c$\Program Files\System Center 2007 R2 Hotfix Utility\KB974144\SetupUpdateOM.exe" /silent /x86msp:KB974144-x86.msp /amd64msp:KB974144-x64.msp /UpdateAgent

Note that you need to pass the user to psexec (which will query for a password) so you can access network resources.  Also note that I needed to enclose my computer list in “ to get it to pass correctly.  YMMV.

Also note that this will not work w/ 2k8+ clients as UAC gets in the way.  You could add –s to the the psexec line but then you would need a file share that the machine accounts could get at.  You could also probably do a small script that did a net use and then accessed the files.  I cheesed out and logged on directly as I only had a few that needed to be done manually. 

Good luck.

How does windows determine a cipher strength for an encrypted connection OR SQL Server data in transit cipher strength

This question is really just “how does windows determine a cipher strength for an encrypted connection” as SQL server just hands off to the windows schannel.dll to deal w/ this. But I was looking to determine the answer for SQL Data in transit encryption.

This was pretty muddy to track down. There are some reference details here, here and here.

At the end of the day, it comes down to an OS version question (potentially influenced by some OS/registry settings or patches). I couldn’t find any matrix anywhere so I am going to start one here. I am going to start out w/ the few I tested and hopefully fill this in w/ reader submissions (hint, hint).  The guidance I can find seems to say that Win 2k8R2 and Win 7 have the same schannel capabilities so I am going to list them together. 

Client\Server	Windows 2008 R2	Windows 2003 SP2	Windows 2000 SP4
Windows 2008R2/7	TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA	SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5	SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5
Windows 2003 SP2	SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA	SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5	SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5
Windows XP SP3	SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA	SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5	SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA

How to use this table: Find the client OS listed vertically down the left side and then find the server OS listed horizontally across the top.  Where the row and column meet is your the cipher which, under the default settings, they should negotiate to use. More on the ciphers here.

How did we determine this? The only way I was able to find was to sniff the beginning of the SSL conversation. Netmon 3.3 is an excellent tool for this.  Note that you may need to set your Windows parsers from stub to full in order to decrypt the TDS packets.  You can do this in Tools -> options -> Parser. Set Windows to ‘Full’



Start your trace before you start your encrypted connection. I like netmon b/c it will separate the network traffic into conversations. Find the conversation you are looking for by IP and port. For my purposes I was looking for my web server IP and my DB IP going to port 1433 on my DB.

Once you have found your conversation, you are going to want to find the SSL conversation. In netmon, it will look like this:


What happens here, generally, is that the client offers a list of supported ciphers in the SSL: Client Hello. In netmon, you can see this by selecting that packet as I have done above. In the ‘Frame details’ pane, you can expand ssl: Client Hello.–> TlsRecordLayer: –> SSLHandshake –> Client Hello:.  You should see a list of CipherSuites listed in order of preference.  See the bottom of the picture below.


The server will respond with cipher it wants.  You can see this in the (likely) next packet under ssl –> TlsRecofdLayer-> SSLHandshake –> ServerHello –> CipherSuite.  In this case, both client and server are running Win 2k8 r2.


As you can see, between Win 2k8r2 and Win 2k8r2 we attain TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA.
There are several methods to influence the SSL Handshake.  The links above will be useful in starting that journey.

One note on AES-128 cipher strength.  For a measure of scale, a computer with a billion processing elements, each capable of trying a billion keys every second, would be able to try (2^60 keys/second).  That means it would take (2^128 keys) / (2^60 keys/second) = 2^68 seconds to brute-force check all 128-bit keys. That is about 10^13 years to crack the key, or about 1000 times the age of the universe. Realistically, you would only need to try half the keys on average so that would be 500 times the age of the universe.

Or you could find a flaw in the algorithm...
or steal the certificate/password...