TimDK

links for 2008-02-27

• Comparing OpsMgr 2007 Security with MOM 2005 Security | NetworkWorld.com Community
  (tags: SCOM2007 Security)

links for 2008-02-26

• The installation may fail when you try to install an SMS mount point on a disk that is larger than 1 terabyte on a Windows Server 2003-based computer
  (tags: SMS2003 Troubleshooting)

SCOM 2007 SP1 Released

System Center Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 has been made available for download today.

New features are:

• Improved performance and reliability when working with alerts, overrides, and searches.
• In all Alert views, performance has been increased through better fetching and yields alert row selection that is three times quicker. Actions and reports are fetched in the background, which further improves performance. Alert knowledge that is displayed in the Alert Details pane can be shown or hidden according to the user's preference.
• Operations Manager 2007 advanced search has been improved by enabling the ability to search across monitors and rules by their overrides.
• Support for the discovery and monitoring of both SNMP v1 and SNMP v2 network devices. Users can select which SNMP Version to search for in the Discovery Wizard.
• Support for exporting Operations Manager 2007 diagrams to Microsoft Visio VDX file format. Note that the Visio button is located on the toolbar when in a diagram view. Diagram layouts can now be saved and will be remembered when the diagram view is selected again.
• Support for copying and pasting (CTRL+C and CTRL+V) from the Alert details pane.
• Added support for earlier versions of e-mail servers to correct an issue that might result in malformed data in subject line of e-mail notifications.

Source: SCOM Techcenter

links for 2008-02-22

• Ports that Systems Management Server 2003 uses to communicate through a firewall or through a proxy server
  (tags: SMS2003 Firewall)

links for 2008-02-21

• MOM 2005 Product Documentation
  (tags: MOM2005 Documentation)
• Windows Live SkyDrive
  (tags: Windows Live SkyDrive)

Techdays

In short: Techdays is the event formerly known as Developer and IT Pro days. Like the past editions the event is again taking place in the ICC Convention Center in Ghent.

Starting of with the official launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 the event will span a total of 3 days.

For the full agenda and an overview of the speakers go and take a look on the event website.

Pushing MOM 2005 agents across firewalls

Pushing a MOM agent to a target machine is pretty straightforward using the agent installation wizard from the MOM console. However when it comes to the point where one or more firewalls are inbetween the MOM server and the target machine things become to get interesting.

For MOM client to server communication opening port 1270 on the firewall is sufficient, however when trying to push out the MOM agents from the server you will need some more bi-directional traffic to be allowed through the firewall:

• SMB (445)
• RPC (135)
• RPC Dynamic (5000-5300)
• ICMP

In general firewall admins like to open the least amount of ports as possible so therefore restricting the dynamic RPC port range is always a good idea. There is a KB article on how to do this.

Building 99

Building 99 is the new research building on the Microsoft campus. For the high-tech gadget lovers this must be the ultimate office space. Scoble has done a sightseeing tour of the facility, check his blog for more info and photos.