Microsoft Windows Servicing Stack Updates (SSU) – A Rant

Copied from my twitter rant here: https://twitter.com/ip1/status/1039668421615529985

May contain edits and be added to at a later time

A rant about service stack updates (SSU) and why Microsoft really needs to work something better out for this:
When the major monthly cumulative update requires the SSU as a pre-req, it creates major pain points with managed deployment. If you are running “unmanaged” and just let clients go to Microsoft directly to get whatever is applicable, then you probably aren’t worried about this.

WSUS Delete Obsolete Updates

NOTE: Usual warnings apply. Do a backup before making any changes. If you are unsure about anything in the post then ask or look for more information or help before attempting it.

Over time WSUS will accumulate update metadata that can create performance issues for clients. In large environments this can be quite an issue.

There is a script Microsoft often provides during Premier Support calls to cleanup this update metadata, however there are a few issues:

• The query can take a *really* long time to run if there are a lot of updates to cleanup. In some cases it can take *days*
• You need to stop all the WSUS services while it runs
• If it fails for whatever reason, it will have to start all over because it doesn’t commit the changes until it completes successfully
• While it runs, the TEMPDB and Transaction logs will grow quite significantly until the data is committed
• It gives no useful information on progress

There is a TechNet article (This is essential reading and has LOTS of important stuff) and a Forum Post where an improved version was written that gave progress of the cleanup, however it didn’t address the temp/transaction growth issues or the time issues. To this end I have applied my very rudimentary SQL scripting skills.

MSSQL user can’t connect until password change

Creating, or recreating, a SQL user account and I forgot to untick the “must change password” option. Damn.

If you try to disable the password policy options, you get a message saying “The CHECK_POLICY and CHECK_EXPIRATION options cannot be turned OFF when MUST_CHANGE is ON. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 15128)”

Rather than recreate the account, you can disable the options using a script

Source: http://www.webofwood.com/2009/01/29/fix-a-sql-server-login-which-has-must_change-set-to-on/

USE Master
GO
ALTER LOGIN [username] WITH PASSWORD = 'samepassword'
GO
ALTER LOGIN [username] WITH
      CHECK_POLICY = OFF,
      CHECK_EXPIRATION = OFF;

 

 

OneDrive Catastrophic Failure

When trying to open a OneDrive folder on the computer you get a catastrophic failure message. This is related to the “Offline” attribute for that folder being reset, possibly due to some other program or action that had been performed in the past.

The same folder can be opened from Windows Explorer when selecting the folder from the left pane view, but the message appears when opening the folder from the right pane view.

You can check the folder location by right-clicking and selecting “Properties”

Open a CMD prompt, CD to the OneDrive folder location found in the properties and use the ATTRIB command to reset the Offline attribute for the folder

ATTRIB -O "Pictures" /s /d

 

If there are a lot of folders showing this issue, the same command can be run against the whole OneDrive folder instead

ATTRIB -O /s /d

Configuration Manager 1610 adventures

Yes, we skipped 1602 and went to 1606 in our Dev environment, but due to various change freezes, conflicts with other projects and change management delays we have decided we will be going from 1511 direct to 1610 in Prod.

The Dev upgrade went OK (using the “FastRing” powershell script) however it was then announced there were some additional bugs found and a newer 1610 installed was released. The updates though have not as yet been posted to update the people that had run the original 1610 install…

Windows Activation Error Codes

A quick reference for the error codes when you get Activation error in Windows

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/activation-errors-windows-10

 

Configuration Manager 1602 adventures

Each new update of ConfigMgr I will start a new entry for anything specific to that version I want to test or make notes of.

ConfigMgr object locked for editing

Often if editing something like a Boot Image or Task Sequence and you experience a console crash, then next time you try to edit that object you may see a message saying it is currently locked for editing, giving only a choice to wait or open as Read-Only.

Some quick (unsupported) database edits can clear the lock, or there is a Powershell command that does the trick as well. The Powershell is a bit trickier, but is the “proper” supported method.

PowerShell: How to unlock objects in SCCM

Powershell Unlock-CMObject: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj821915(v=sc.20).aspx

and more info on how SEDO works: http://blogs.technet.com/b/sudheesn/archive/2012/10/28/sedo-serialized-editing-of-distributed-objects-configmgr-2012.aspx

 

Windows 10 Speech language missing

 

As part of the Insider program I get rather frequent upgrades to Windows 10. Each time the upgrade installs it resets my speech language to “English (United States)” which means Cortana stops working as my Region is set to “Australia”

I also use ConfigMgr to handle updates on my network (this would also apply for people using WSUS) so when I go into the Region & language settings I don’t get the Speech feature appearing under the “English (Australia)” options.

Luckily, it is relatively easy to sort out.

SOLUTION:

Configuration Manager 1511 adventures

I am starting work on now upgrading have upgraded our ConfigMgr2012 R2 hierarchies to the new “Configuration Manager with no more version numbers” build 1511. There are roughly 120+ site servers in the central hierarchy (across 2 CAS hierarchies), so hopefully things go well. For the most part things went quite well, no major issues at all.

I’ll keep this page to note any special gotchas that are outside the various step-by-step guides already out there, and also some easy quick link references.