Task Scheduler service is not available

Another one of those “this has been bugging me for ages” things. Sometime *ages* ago one of my servers had an unexpected shutdown (crash/bugcheck whatever). After it came back up and all the various repair and recovery stuff completed it was back to normal… more or less.

One thing that started happening was that the task scheduler would throw an error “Task Scheduler is not available. Task Scheduler will attempt to reconnect to it.” every time it was opened, and some scheduled tasks didn’t always seem to trigger.

Overall I didn’t bother about it too much as I planned to decommission the server anyway. One and a half years later, the server is still going :sigh:

Create a “dummy” Distribution Point Group for testing

When working with new packages, in particular very large ones, or when performing an action with a wizard that insists on adding distribution points (e.g. Software Update download) I find it helpful to use a “dummy” Distribution Point Group.

The reason for this is simple. For example, I want to create a new Software Updates deployment package that will contain a lot of updates, and using the wizard it requires me to select a target to distribute this new package to. I plan to add other updates or make further changes so I don’t really want (or need) it to be sent to an actual DP just yet. This is especially true when creating temporary update source content (another issue for another post).

To work around this, I just create a “Blank”, or testing Distribution Point Group with no members. This DP Group is perfectly fine to use in the wizard and allows the package source to be created and downloaded without then needing to wait for it to be sent to the DP.

Automagically documenting Config Manager Task Sequences

Being able to document Task Sequences is a handy thing, but doing it manually is incredibly tedious, error prone, and likely to miss details.

There is a process that has been around for a while now, so I figured I’d just post it here for easy reference as I keep forgetting where to find it. This process was developed for ConfigMgr 2007, but there is also a way to do it for 2012 as well.

ConfigMgr OSD fails to start in WinPE

A simple task sequence deployed to a collection, a virtual machine (Hyper-V guest) booting with PxE to run that task sequence.

WinPE starts up, loads the networking (which gives a working IP address, can ping/connect to servers) but then the computer just reboots. No errors or warnings.

With WinPE debug mode enabled, you can press F8 to load the command prompt, but smsts.log doesn’t report an obvious error. Lot’s of “access denied” type messages that led me hunting issues with Network access accounts and such