I just released my first management pack for System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).
It’s a management pack for Trend Micro’s IMSS.
You can download the management pack here:
http://www.maartendamen.com/?page_id=190
Trend Micro IMSS management pack for SCOM
February 27th, 2010
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XML-RPC package
February 24th, 2010
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Alot of people were e-mailing/asking me about this package.
It has been added for download, here: http://www.maartendamen.com/?page_id=14&did=3
Significant CPU increase after installing McAfee 8.7 (patch 2) on Windows 2008
February 23rd, 2010
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Last week we deployed the new McAfee 8.7 virusscan software.
After the installation we noticed that some servers got slower. Especially our SCOM environment suffered from this increased CPU usage (SCOM being a CPU intensive application itself, didn’t have enough CPU time left to process all agent traffic). This ultimately ended up in not being able to monitor anything.
Here’s an image of the increased CPU usage (this is our SCOM report server):
Change pagefile settings on multiple servers using Powershell
February 19th, 2010
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Today I wanted to change the page file settings on some of our servers (about 80), doing that by hand would take ages.
That’s why I came up with the following Powershell script, the script does the following:
- Loop through a list of Windows 2003 servers in our active directory, only Windows 2003 machines were needed. You can easily modify the search filter though.
- Set pagefile size on those servers, minimum size and maximum size set to “0″ means the pagefile settings will be set on “system managed”
So, here’s the full source of the script:
Plugwise protocol unleashed part 3: internal clock information
February 6th, 2010
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Introduction
In the Plugwise protocol unleashed series, I will describe the plugwise protocol. As far as I have been able to re-engineer it. I did this re-engineering work because there is no Linux/OSX software available to control your plugwise devices. All information in these series are based on the 2.0 firmware version!
DISCLAIMER: use of the information in these articles is at your own risk.
This information is not supported by Plugwise B.V. in any way.
In this part of the series we will have a look at the device information request and response.
Circle internal clock
Plugwise protocol unleashed part 2: device information
February 1st, 2010
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Introduction
In the Plugwise protocol unleashed series, I will describe the plugwise protocol. As far as I have been able to re-engineer it. I did this re-engineering work because there is no Linux/OSX software available to control your plugwise devices. All information in these series are based on the 2.0 firmware version!
DISCLAIMER: use of the information in these articles is at your own risk.
This information is not supported by Plugwise B.V. in any way.
In this part of the series we will have a look at the device information request and response.
Device information request
The device information request looks like this:
Automating/reading sensorbin status using JeeNode/Arduino
January 30th, 2010
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I’m currently playing around with Jeenode boards. The JeeNode is a small wireless board with an 8-bit Atmel RISC microprocessor. JeeNodes are compatible with the Arduino platform and can be programmed under Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux using sketches created with the Arduino IDE. As a first test of it’s capabilities, I wanted to read out the state of the cover of my recycle bin.
I have one of these recycle bins:
http://www.easybin.nl/Easybin_2009-2010/assortiment.html
(deluxe 50)
The cover automatically opens when it detects motion over it.. this is nice and hygienic.
I decided to open up my bin. Once opened I quickly notices the most interesting part of the bin.. the motion sensor and the LED that flashes when the bin is in the open state.
vSphere web access not working – The attempt to acquire a valid session ticket for took longer than expected.
January 25th, 2010
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Today I wanted to give someone remote console access using vSphere web access.
I granted him virtual machine user access, which should be sufficient. However after installing the component for remote console view. The session failed with the following error:
Plugwise protocol unleashed part 1: introduction
January 24th, 2010
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Introduction
In the Plugwise protocol unleashed series, I will describe the plugwise protocol. As far as I have been able to re-engineer it. I did this re-engineering work because there is no Linux/OSX software available to control your plugwise devices. All information in these series are based on the 2.0 firmware version!
DISCLAIMER: use of the information in these articles is at your own risk.
This information is not supported by Plugwise B.V. in any way.
So what is plugwise anyway?
SCOM alert notification subscription delay sending for x minutes and don’t sent if alert is auto-resolved within that time
December 17th, 2009
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In my company we are using SCOM for monitoring our server environment.
Off hours we also get notified about critical alerts using a SMS/GSM modem.
Using default SCOM functionality we delay the sending of notifications by 5 minutes. This works fine for alerts with a “new” state.
However if an alert is closed within the 5 minute period a “closed” notification is sent out.
We do not want to see the closed alerts if an alert auto-resolved within the 5 minute time period. But if a new alert that has aged 5 minutes and sent to our GSM, we definately want to see that closed alert if it auto/manual resolves into the closed state (to make sure someone actually did something about the alert)
Using default SCOM functionality, this is not possible. This is why we came up with the following idea (special thanks to my colleague Frank):
- Using two seperate subscriptions, one for “new” alerts and one for “closed” alerts.
- On the new alert subscription set a channel with a powershell script to update custom field 1 when a SMS has been sent (this subscription has the 5 minute delay)
- On the closed alert subscription set a condition to check custom field 1 to see wheter a SMS has been sent or not.
This blog post describes how this can be done within SCOM.
