Compare running services against a baseline using Powershell

Some quick commands I hacked together to make it easier to check what services are running on a machine after it has restarted, and compare them against a “known good” baseline of the services that *should* be running.

The key purpose was for after a server crash to check the services such as SQL and exchange have all started again.

Configuration Manager Power Policies not applying

Sigh. Turns out this is one of those “obvious” facepalm issues. Posting the issue anyway in the event other people come across it.

Windows clients on Configuration Manager 2012 R2 are not applying power policies at all. Standard Windows power settings still applied and available.

•  Client policy enabled for applying power settings
• Collection has a power policy configured (either pre-existing or custom)
• No Group Policies configured to apply any sort of power settings
• Client in collection
• PolicyEvaluator.log and PolicyAgent.log both indicate the policy has been applied by the client
  • Policy appears with the CollectionID as a reference
• No power configuration change occur on the target workstation
• Lots of activity in pwrmgmt.log, but nothing seem specific to the policy I have configured, and no errors
• PwrProvider.log just repeats message: “Failed to read ValueUnitsSpecifier” and nothing else
• No Windows Event Viewer messages stand-out as related to this issue

Windows Update failing with “Proxy authentication required” 0x8024401B errors

This issue isn’t specifically related to Configuration Manager or Windows Updates, but it does seem that Windows Updates itself could behave better to prevent this.

When Windows Updates attempts to connect to the WSUS server (or SUP), you will see the WINDOWSUPDATE.LOG show the client attempting to open the client.asmx file from the WSUS server. The lines following show this connection failing with “SyncUpdates failure, error = 0x8024401B, soap client error = 10, soap error code = 0, HTTP status code = 407” followed by several more 0x8024401b errors.