SCCM 2012 R2 Clients failed downloading content

Was required to manage clients in untrusted domain in a recent SCCM deployment and one of pilot machine (Windows 7) was not able to have the published app successfully installed, while the other got installed successfully.

Checking on the DataTransferService.log, it includes log saying “DAV request. HTTP code 401, status 'Unauthorized'”

Checked and verified that the network access account for SCCM has been configured and there’s no firewall restriction between the client and SCCM server.

Googled around and found out that KB2522623 might be able to fix the problem, and it really did once the patch was applied.

Automated Profile Migration with SCCM–Orchestrator

Had a chance to be involved in a project whereby a client had requested to implement user state and profile migration via SCCM / USMT.

This basically requires configuring the State Migration Point in the SCCM site server and creating computer association, determining from which machine (Source) the user’s profile and data files are being migrated over to (Target)

Then, there will be 2 separate Task Sequences to capture and restore user’s profile and files via USMT scanstate and loadstate executions. As the rule of thumb, the Task Sequence to restore user’s data should only be run after the data capture has successfully executed.

I decided to take a step further by further automating the entire process via System Center 2012 R2 Orchestrator.

It consists of several runbooks, ranging from

• Performing readiness check, making sure both machines are ready for user’s profile and data transfer
  
  
• Performing user’s profile and data migration by
  • creating the computer association
  • pushing the task sequences to both source and target machines and verify its execution
  
• Replicating all the SCCM direct membership collections from the source to destination, ensuring additional software / applications are successfully pushed to the target machine
  
  

which are all called from a main runbook

Failed to capture windows 8 reference image via SCCM 2012 R2 capture media

Had recently started to play around with SCCM 2012 R2 and wanted to explore more on OSD and task sequencing. Tried to capture a Windows 8 image after i had set it up with latest updates, it failed when the capture media was inserted and TSMBAutorun.exe was executed.

As expected, once the sysprep commands are completed, the machine will be rebooted the capturing should start. In this case, it didn’t and went into “sysprep” mode whereby i was asked to personalize the windows 8 again.

Tried asking around and this seemed to have to do with the RAM allocated (mine was a VM, running on dynamic RAM 512 – 1024).

What i did next, shut down the VM, set the RAM to be static 2GB and run the capture media again, and voila…. it works. :)

many thanks to my fellow MVP for this similar blog post here

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