Tag Archives: CM 2012

Adaptiva OneSite – Configuration – Setting Preferred Clients

I’m sure that at one point in most technical careers, people have run into those networks which are similar to a spider’s web, spun by a drunk black widow. The illustration below is tame compared to what I’ve encountered, but it will serve a purpose for this article. The Main Office symbol represents a Configuration Manager Primary Site, the Office ### symbols represent locations housing Distribution Points, and the lettered symbols represent smaller sites and branch offices.

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When designing a Configuration Manager infrastructure, the network topology is very important in determining where to put additional Primary Sites, Secondary Sites, and Distribution Points, based on network layout, link speeds, endpoint populations, and other factors. You can leverage your Configuration Manager infrastructure for OneSite and using preferred client settings is a way to achieve a certain amount of network traffic isolation with respect to content pre-staging and downloads. Referring to the diagram above, the Office ### sites have been made parent sites to those smaller down-line sites for the purposes of this exercise.

Keep in mind that OneSite content download requests may flow up a topology but stop at the top of the hierarchy (Central Office). A OneSite preferred client is one that will handle all content requests from down-line clients, provided the content is present, prior to the request being sent to the Central Office site. That being said, looking at the diagram below (which is a portion of the first diagram presented), a case could be made for setting the preferred client key on Office 003 and Office 004 for their child sites.

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Setting a preferred client within OneSite will force down-line clients to look to the preferred client first before traversing up-line in the network topology when requesting content. Here is how to create a client setting which will set this variable within the environment.

From within Adaptiva Workbench, starting at the Home perspective, expand Workbench perspectives, expand Misc and then select the System Configuration Perspective from the result choices.

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After the System Configuration Perspective screen loads, create a new client settings policy by selecting “Create New Client Settings Policy.” The Custom Client Settings Policy Editor panel will load to the right.

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Within the Custom Client Settings Policy Editor, set an intuitive name for your new policy setting, provide a short description and priority, and set a settings override priority. To the right, click the Add Collection. A drop-down menu will appear, showing collections from your Configuration Manager environment. Select the collection in which you have placed those OneSite clients you wish to be set as preferred clients for specific down-line branches of your OneSite network topology. (This section is located in the top panel of the Policy Editor screen.)

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Within the System config settings panel (located at the bottom of the Policy Editor screen), expand SystemConfig, expand Contentsystem, then drag Client type from the left, into and over the SystemConfig setting in section labeled “Overridden client settings by this policy” until you see a “+” sign appear, then release the mouse button to add the attribute. Within the “Overridden client settings by this policy,” expand Contentsystem and select Client type. In the far right section, change the “New value” to 1. Click the Apply button at the top of this panel.

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Click the Save icon in the top left of the Custom Client Settings Policy Editor section and your policy will be saved and applied to the CM collection you designated earlier. In the future, if additional preferred clients are needed, simply add them to the same CM collection.

CM 2012 – Configuration – Custom Client Settings for SUP

A client recently requested preliminary design for moving security updates from WSUS to CM 2012.  There were several requirements for the move as well:  1) SUP would need to be tested on a small group of clients initially;  2) WSUS would need to remain in parallel during the process in order to keep current desktop/laptop clients and servers patched; 3) WSUS would need to remain in place after the move as the server team would continue to use it until their conversion to CM 2012.

I’m only going to focus on how custom client settings were used to segment out the test group from the main body of desktops and laptops.  (There were Group Policy and other adjustments which had to be made as well, but they are not part of this discussion.)

First, I created a test collection to house the initial software updates test group.

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Current Default Client settings have Software Updates turned off.

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I created a custom client device setting specifically targeted at software updates.  You can do this by navigating to Administration > [expand] Overview > [expand] Site Configuration > [select] Client Settings, then either right-click on Client Settings and select “Create Custom Client Device Settings” or click the same-named icon in the top ribbon.

On the General tab of the resulting screen, I named the Custom Device Settings “Software Updates – Enabled” and checked the Software Updates box.  Checking this box reveals the Software Updates tab in the left panel.

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On the Software Updates tab, I enabled software updates on clients (1 in the picture below), set bundling of updates having deadlines within 1 day of any update which has reached its deadline. (2 and 3 in the picture below) Save the custom client setting by clicking OK and then deploy it to the test collection.  I set the priority of the setting to 1.  If this is your first custom setting, it will default to a priority of 1.  You can change the priority of any custom setting by right-clicking on the setting and using the Increase or Decrease Priority selections from the drop-down menu.  Remember that the lower the priority number, the higher the priority in settings application on the client machine.

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The newly deployed shows up under the deployments tab of the custom settings.

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Force a Machine Policy Retrieval & Evaluation Cycle on the machines located in the test collection and the new custom settings will be applied.  You can check this by looking at the Components tab of the Configuration Manager control panel applet.

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Initiate a Software Updates Scan Cycle on the machines located in the test collection and then spot-check the WUAHandler.log file on those machines to validate that the clients are pointing to the correct SUP server and that the scan is not encountering any errors which need addressing.  You should see something similar to the below entries in the log file.

Enabling WUA Managed server policy to use server: [YOUR SERVER HERE]
Async searching of updates using WUAgent started.
Async searching completed.
Successfully completed scan.

If you feel so inclined, use a tool such as Roger Zanders Client Center to check things out. (http://sccmclictr.codeplex.com/  –  don’t forget to donate!)

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CM 2012–Configuration – Software Update Point Settings

I’ve had this question posed a number of times, “How do I change the Software Update Point settings after I’ve installed SUP?”  If you’re new to the CM 2012 console, finding where to configure additional settings can be somewhat challenging at times.

Navigate to Administration > Site Configuration > Sites > the site which has SUP installed
Right-click on the site and select Configure Site Components > Software Update Point

Step 01

Choose the tab which contains the items you want to configure. In the picture below, I drew arrows to the update classifications tab and the products tab.  When you are finished, click Apply and OK.

Step 02