[SCCM] SMS Agent Host (ccmexec) hangs on Windows 10 1903/1909 – no updates/software are being installed

Update 18.02.2020: I have gotten some new information that suggests that you might be able to solve this issue not only by enabling the Windows Defender Antivirus service on the client, but also by disabling the Endpoint Protection feature on the SCCM server instead. But since I do not have access to our SCCM server (as stated below) I cannot test this approach myself. Feel free to leave a comment below if this actually works too.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in all things SCCM. I have not had any kind of training and I have no access to our local SCCM server at all, not even read-only access. Everything I know is self-taught from bits and pieces I have picked up here and there. A huge jigsaw puzzle with lots of holes to fill – not to mention all the pieces I have dropped under the table by now.

Our resident SCCM guy has been working on deploying Windows 10 1909 to our clients for a couple of weeks now and after overcoming an issue (with my help) that prematurely killed the task sequence (a story for another time) he finally managed to deploy a system that satisfied the requirements I had set.

But even before that, he had accidentally deployed the “1909 Insider Preview” package to a total of seven machines. In addition to those, we had of course manually upgraded a handful machines to 1909 to test it out or to fix other random issues with Windows 10 clients here and there.

Right after the accidental deployment of the Insider Preview version of 1909 we noticed that the SCCM Software Center was in English, and not our usual German locale. A repair installation of the SCCM Client fixed that issue.

[Hardware] Fujitsu Esprimo Q958 will not power down with USB device connected

A couple of months ago, around August-September I believe, we got a new model of Fujitsu Mini-PCs – the Esprimo Q958. We had already been using the Q957 without any troubles for a while so we did not expect to face any problems with this new iteration either. Besides a newer CPU generation (Core i5 8^th Gen compared to Core i5 7^th Gen) nothing had really changed, we thought.

But soon after deploying a number of those new Fujitsu Esprimo Q958 machines to our users we got weird reports of machines not fully powering down when shutting down Windows.

The machines would simply stay powered on when you pressed the “Shut down” button in Windows. The machines would keep running, with power management disabled, and thus the CPU would soon get warmer and warmer, making the fan turn on to 100%, which in turn resulted in a lot of noise thanks to the very small fan.

[Powershell] How to annoy your users to restart their computers more often

A few days ago someone on /r/sysadmin asked how others are making their users restart the computer more often.

Since I wrote a little Powershell script for exactly this purpose back in march I thought I'd share it here.

Sending Wake-on-LAN packets from a Wi-Fi device or "why you should disable Windows 10 quick boot"

Recently one of my co-workers signed up for doing home office a few days every week. Being the exemplary user he should be (working in IT and all) he tried waking up his office machine using his notebook a few days before he was going to do home office. And against all expectations ... nothing happened.

Java usage tracking or "How to figure out what Java is used for in your environment"

UPDATE 2018-10-17: The release notes of Java 8u191/192 indicate that the location of the usagetracker.properties file has been changed. The guide below has been updated accordingly.

Oracle announced the end of Java 8 and that they will no longer provide free updates for Java 8 for enterprises after January 2019 here and here. And while Mozilla, Google and even Microsoft already removed Java support from their respective flagship browsers Oracle also announced that they will drop the browser plugin completely in upcoming releases.

[Guest Post] Restoring a Windows System Image from a backup on a network location

This post will explain to you how to perform a full system restore from a backup made with Windows Server Backup (WSB) on Windows 2012R2/2016. The only two things you will need are a backup made with Windows Server Backup and an ISO file of the corresponding Windows version that you want to restore.

Packaging non-executable files as VMWare ThinApps

We are running a VMware Horizon/vSphere environment with a number of virtual desktops. And because I do not want to have all software available on all desktop pools nor do I want to maintain a stupid amount of golden images I was looking into how to create virtual applications using VMWare ThinApp and linking these to specific desktop pools.

And since Murphy likes to make my day miserable I obviously started with the worst application of them all.