Archiving Computers in MEMCM
I work with some serious and talented people. Working with serious and talented (and seriously talented) people is, essentially, my mission in life. The take is that I’m just learning this constantly. The give is that I’m frequently challenged in many ways that include time, talent, energy, and flexibility among others. I got a message about our SCCM (MEMCM) server sending out a significant amount of DNS queries to hostnames which, as far as anyone can tell, have no business being queried. It’s a bit of a mystery to me, so let’s get digging.
First Things First
I got a list of hostnames. They aren’t FQDN and that can complicate things as we have several domains on our network however that’s some legacy thinking. I had already made a script to somewhat comprehensively get information from SCCM, AD, and other resources on our network but it was, at this point, years old and had partially been corrupted by one of my computers at some point so there was precious little reason to carry it forward. Additionally, it was doing much more than I wanted or needed. So throw that away and let’s start very simple.
$computers = Get-Content 'c:\users\mark\Downloads\sccm.txt'
$output = @() #dangerously generic variable naming
This is just the housekeeping stuff. Now, there’s another crucial thing here and that is to connect to SCCM via PowerShell session. The SCCM console (MEMCM console–I don’t think I’ll ever live that down) has that set up for you if you click on the blue arrow menu on the top left (the approximation of The Ribbon). You can start a PowerShell session through ISE and that should give you the code that you need to include to get that going. I copy it from here because it has changed over the years and has become a bit more accepting and flexible.
You’ll note that you can enable verbosity as you load the PS module and, well, I’m pretty into it so I did. It will also let you know that the script is advancing without needing to have any print to screen commands, if you’re lazy like I am. PowerShell has the concept of PowerShell Drives, and I know this is maybe more recent than the 5.x we are mostly running on our Windows systems but it holds true, and the MEMCM Site (a concept with which you should be familiar with at this point) is a PSDrive just like the Registry can be.
cd CCM: #assuming that your site code is CCM
Excellent. Now, if you did enable the verbosity when loading the MEMCM PS modules you would have noticed that it imports a whole slew of commandlets. We’re primarily concerned with one easy one at this moment in time.
Get-CMDevice -Name computername
That’s it. That’s all you’ll need as far as CCM commandlets but, again, there’s a lot of them and some are incredibly useful.
Analysis
What you want to do is have a variable like $output = @() which is a nifty array. Then you’ll iterate over all of the hostnames and add the CM device to the array. From here you can examine them by selecting some of the more useful fields like Name, Domain, LastActiveTime, LastClientTime, LastHardwareScan, LastLogonUser, MACAddress, SerialNumber to view as they’ll give you some idea of how active this device is.
If you have a really strong asset management process, then it’s cruise control but for some organizations you do need to go back and check out what’s up with some machines. In my case, the site server was popping off a bunch of requests for the devices but they weren’t in service anymore and were marked off in other systems or just stuffed in a drawer. Having that connectivity to all your systems in terms of asset management is several posts for another day but, needless to say, it is important.
From here, use the Swiss army knife of IT that is Excel (or not, I’m not your supervisor) to select what you want to get rid of. Export that csv and then we’re off to the races.
Execution
Use Import-CSV to import that CSV into a neat array of objects. Then there’s just one more cmdlet you need, and that is Remove-CMDevice. You can definitely use the Name attribute with that cmdlet and, if you don’t want to confirm each one, use the force flag.
$csv = Import-CSV '.\selections.csv\'
foreach ($record in $csv) {
Remove-CMDevice -DeviceName $record.Name -Force #don't ask for confirmation
}
So that’s really it. As always, test. I happened to have many computers that did not have a LastActiveTime so those got purged. They were correlated through several sources to no longer be active so I had no real negative implications but that may be different where you are.
Be nice.
./content/posts/archiving-computers-sccm.md 9:1 warning Use first person (such as 'I Microsoft.FirstPerson ') sparingly. 9:86 warning Consider removing 'seriously'. Microsoft.Adverbs 9:130 warning Use first person (such as Microsoft.FirstPerson 'my') sparingly. 9:167 warning Use first person (such as Microsoft.FirstPerson 'I'm') sparingly. 9:219 warning Use first person (such as Microsoft.FirstPerson 'I'm') sparingly. 9:322 warning Use first person (such as ' I Microsoft.FirstPerson ') sparingly. 9:345 warning Try to avoid using Microsoft.We first-person plural like 'our'. 9:523 warning Use first person (such as Microsoft.FirstPerson 'me') sparingly. 9:530 warning Try to avoid using Microsoft.We first-person plural like 'let's'. 12:1 warning Use first person (such as 'I Microsoft.FirstPerson ') sparingly. 12:79 warning Try to avoid using Microsoft.We first-person plural like 'we'. 12:79 error Use 'we've' instead of 'we Microsoft.Contractions have'. 12:106 warning Try to avoid using Microsoft.We first-person plural like 'our'. 12:236 error More than 3 commas! marktoso.TresComas 12:265 warning Try to avoid using Microsoft.We first-person plural like 'our'. 12:322 warning Consider removing 'partially'. Microsoft.Adverbs 12:357 warning Use first person (such as Microsoft.FirstPerson 'my') sparingly. 12:482 warning Use first person (such as ' I Microsoft.FirstPerson ') sparingly. 12:526 warning Try to avoid using Microsoft.We first-person plural like 'let's'. 12:538 warning Consider removing 'very'. Microsoft.Adverbs 17:82 error Use 'that's' instead of 'that Microsoft.Contractions is'. 17:441 warning Use first person (such as ' I Microsoft.FirstPerson ') sparingly. 19:80 warning Use first person (such as Microsoft.FirstPerson 'I'm') sparingly. 19:101 warning Use first person (such as ' I Microsoft.FirstPerson ') sparingly. 19:237 warning Use first person (such as ' I Microsoft.FirstPerson ') sparingly. 19:416 warning Use first person (such as ' I Microsoft.FirstPerson ') sparingly. 19:463 warning Try to avoid using Microsoft.We first-person plural like 'we'. 19:463 error Use 'we're' instead of 'we Microsoft.Contractions are'. 19:488 warning Try to avoid using Microsoft.We first-person plural like 'our'. 23:151 warning Try to avoid using Microsoft.We first-person plural like 'We'. 30:110 warning Consider using 'all' instead Microsoft.Wordiness of 'all of'. 30:211 warning Consider using 'some' instead Microsoft.Wordiness of 'some of the'. 32:15 warning Consider removing 'really'. Microsoft.Adverbs 32:177 warning Use first person (such as Microsoft.FirstPerson 'my') sparingly. 32:485 error Use 'it's' instead of 'it is'. Microsoft.Contractions 34:43 error Use 'that's' instead of 'that Microsoft.Contractions is'. 34:66 warning Use first person (such as Microsoft.FirstPerson 'I'm') sparingly. 34:155 warning Try to avoid using Microsoft.We first-person plural like 'we'. 37:115 error Use 'that's' instead of 'that Microsoft.Contractions is'. 45:11 warning Consider removing 'really'. Microsoft.Adverbs 45:78 error Use 'didn't' instead of 'did Microsoft.Contractions not'. 45:201 warning Use first person (such as ' I Microsoft.FirstPerson ') sparingly. 49:210 warning Use first person (such as ' I Microsoft.FirstPerson ') sparingly.✖ 8 errors, 35 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.