Monday, July 04, 2005

The hunt for non-PC SMS programs (SMS 2003 SDK v3)

Having created an SMS script late yesterday, setting the MOM flag on the programs for one of my customers, he came back and told me, he had to do an SMS restore as it trashed the image packages.
Bad, bad.

Ok, I said to myself. I'll just modify the program to skip those image package programs - and exclude any device management programs as well.
But this was easier than done. First of all, I'm at Tech-Ed in Amsterdam with my fellow blogger Dennis. Secondly, the battery of my Dell is bad and finding power for charging is difficult here at the RAI.

Having come across all those obstacles, I went on...

First I stumbled across v3 of the SMS SDK. It was released June 21st. Get it from MS downloads. This is a must-have for all doing SMS automation. The official voice says: New for the SMS V3 SDK is a .NET server side library which simplifies access to the SMS WMI site provider, and Device Management inventory extensibility information.

So I looked to the program flags and found that bit 9 indicates a device program. But how do I see, that the program is an OS installation?

That it NOT documented.

Found it myself though. The SMS_Package class has an ImageFlags property. It seems to be zero - remember this is undocumented and at your own risk - for normal packages.

So I redid my script and can now first filter away the image packages and then the device programs.

I hope my customer does not have to do a new restore tomorrow...

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