philipnet

Well the rain held off until I got home – so so much for that reducing the number of people who actually attended. However there were noticeable spaces, so MS were right to overbook it (as is the general practise anyway). So what did I get out of “The Read More...

Sort of.

As you may (or may not) know, I live and work in the UK. In my previous job I worked with SMS and I still keep in touch with the online community I discovered. And it's through that community that I found this: http://spaces.msn.com/members/alfred/Blog/cns!1peScUDIRoEIsu-1YenjVb8w!301.entry .

At the end of September, Microsoft will putting on a "The Best of MMS" at their Reading campus, near where I live. It's a one-day event with what looks like to be some overview sessions of what SMS and MOM are capable of. I've already signed myself up for it and you can do the same here: https://msevents-eu.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-GB&eventid=118761227 .

I’m having a lovely time here with MOM .

I’ve just been looking at the MBSA scanner. Not only do you have to create the web share on a server and configure MOM to use that, under Windows 2003 you have to specifically disable Windows Authentication or else the clients won’t be able to connect .

As it is, we don’t have a policy for patching servers so there is little to no point in actually running the scans – so I’ve disabled them.

There’s a MOM 2005 Management Pack for SMS 2003: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=99834c12-fb4d-4174-a727-926d358ca593.
And there’s a MOM 2005 Management Pack for Dell PowerEdge servers: http://support.euro.dell.com/uk/en/filelib/index.aspx?sid=PWE_PNT_XEO_1600SC&cat=0&os=WNET&dev=5934&devlib=36&fileid=R98393&file=127527.

Where as SMS has a hugely popular list: http://lists.listleague.com/mailman/listinfo/mssms/ , MOM has a hugely popular newsgroup news:microsoft.public.mom .

And where as SMS requires configuration to get going – all I did with MOM was install the appropriate management packs and add the relevant servers.

Today I’ve already uninstalled our test installation of ACT  – MOM was complaining that it couldn’t connect to the SQL Server Agent on our test server where our test installation of ACT had gone. MOM reported the same message for our SMS box, but the SQL Server Agent

And they said MOM was hard!

(OK – so that kinda sets me up for it to all go wrong - but then that gives me an opportunity to learn!)

I’m trying out the MOM 2005 evaluation at work on a test 2003 machine.

The only two points worth mentioning are that you need to install ASP.Net and that you need to start the SQL Server Agent and ensure that it gets started whenever the machine (re)starts.

Whilst I was downloading several MOM management packs, I came across a link which said “Sign up for Download Notifications” and pointed me to: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=39737 .

After following a few links I managed to sign up for a shed load of emails from Microsoft. Time will tell just how many of them are useful/of any use.

One mildly amusing thing (from my point of view) is that I can sign up for different language versions of their main emails  . One annoying thing (from my point of view) is they don't provide English/UK versions of all of their English/US mailings  .