Fixed it

In work related news we applied Service Pack 2 to our SMS server a few weeks back. We had some minor problems that were resolved with a few hours of work.

Or so we thought.

On Monday one of the desktop support group let us know that non-domain machines were no longer showing up in the SMS admin console. Having been the one who got this working 15 months ago I was kind of surprised as there isn't much to it. I also didn't really have time to work on it as I'm in the middle of setting up a DR site for our AD domain.

The other 2 SMS admins spent Monday and Tuesday working on it. Didn't get anywhere. I had advised them to call Microsoft but that never happened. On Wednesday one of the desktop guys called Microsoft. That didn't go over to well with our boss. Can't really blame the guy - he just wants to be able to do his job. So one of the other admins gets on the phone with Microsoft and spends the day trying various things. Thursday morning comes and it still doesn't work. I'm caught up on the DR site so I move a machine out of the domain, remove the SMS client and then reinstall it as a non-domain system to our test SMS server. I also run Ethereal (now WireShark). The trace was interesting as it showed a HTTP error - invalid hostname. Hmmm - where have I seen that before? And then it hits me - we have Host Header Names configured inside IIS. Standard procedure here as it helps keep the script kiddies away. I disable the Host Header Names, restart the SMS client software and within 5 minutes the system shows up in the SMS admin console. Cool!

So the SMS lead is on the phone with Microsoft at this time. I ask the Microsoft guy  what changed in sp2 that broke sites using Host Headers. Silence. So we change the settings on the production server and machines start showing up. Our information is supposed to make it into a KB article.

Thirty minutes start to finish vs 3.5 days going nowhere. Some days I suprise myself. :-)