Day Five and Six: ITMU and the Test Environment.

Hey can you look into updating to ITMU v. 3? I think we need it by March. I actually got this email from admin no. 3 a couple of days before we did the patch update. It was the first time I had heard of the Inventory Tool for Microsoft Updates aka ITMU. Researching what it was and why it need to be updated by March actually really helped out with the patch updates we did, since I had some idea of how Microsoft intended the monthly updates to be deployed. Guess what? It really does need to be in place by March. Microsoft will stop updating the old one and ITMU will break if we don’t update. Lucky me, I get a chance to break our patch system within the next 2 months. Actually, I don’t think it will be a big issue. We already have ITMU installed, so we meet all the current prerequisites. Version 3 has the same requirements, so we’ll just need to walk through the install. However, being the good little admin that I am, I pushed that we needed to walk through it on the test environment first. No problem, since it’s all on Virtual Machines. Well it wouldn’t have been a problem, until I found out that the old admin wiped all his boxes the day he left. His SMS test environment was completely lost. No DC, no parent site server, no child site server, and no clients.

Needless to say, days five and six have been an excruciatingly long effort to recreate the SMS test environment. Everything from installing Win2k3, Active Directory, Creating user accounts, Installing SQL server, IIS, BITS, SMS, SMS SP2, etc. You have to extend the AD schema? Give the SMS computer permissions to AD? Who came up with this insane procedure? I’ve installed SMS before, but I always hate doing it. I keep promising myself, this will be the last time. I’ll make nice backups of my VM’s and find some place to store them. Yeah right, in 9 months I’ll have a need to start over. Something will break and it’ll be easier to do a clean install than fix it. I didn’t quite finish today, so the whole thing will be waiting for me tomorrow. I hope I don’t hit any walls.