Comments on: Programmatically Check for Management Pack updates in OpsMgr 2007 R2

By: Daniele Muscetta

Daniele Muscetta — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:26:09 +0000

Yes it it pretty hardcore – I basically reverse engineered the communication to be able to interact with a webservice that is, in fact, only intended to be used in conjunction with the GUI.
But there was really no other way…

By: Steve Ross

Steve Ross — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:53:49 +0000

…wow…this is hard core…and awesome. Thanks for sharing!

By: Daniele Muscetta

Daniele Muscetta — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:20:07 +0000

Jamie, for questions there used to be NNTP newsgroups, now replaced by the new web forums. Read more at Kevin's blog http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2009/05/22/new-web-based-forums-for-opsmgr-no-more-nntp-newsgroups.aspx

As for the script, it still seems to be working, but in the future it might work or not work, as the webservice has not really been documented or released for anyone other than the console to use… so it might change. In fact, the Product Group has been asked (not just by me – http://blogs.technet.com/stefan_stranger/archive/2009/05/15/when-will-there-be-wsdl-for-the-mp-catalog-webservice.aspx) if they will provide more specification about the webservice… but I have not had a reply yet. Therefore, I think that means "no"…

Also, if you look at the GUI in R2 when checking for MPs from the internet, it will show you a certificate, and the whole conversation is now happening over HTTPS rather than HTTP. It still seems to work the way it worked, other than on teh more secure protocol…. but if the web service changes, it will be more difficult to reverse engineer, but it will provide transport security so that you know you really are downloading MPs from Microsoft.com, not from somewhere else through a man-in-the-middle attack.

Finally, adding the three lines by RichardK to handle the proxy is really simple – it should go after line 30.
But I would suggest you skip this and just use the console… this was meant as an experiment, not for production use.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:31:24 +0000

Hi we also run Proxy servers for all our servers I am not familiar with powershell scripting and Richard K has posted the code kindly but where does the code need to be inserted and also wll this script work with Scom 2007 R2 Eval ?
Also where is the best place to post questions on Scom 2007 R2 ? So far I am unable to get the DFS Windows 2003 Pack working on our servers.
Thanks for your help in advance.

By: Daniele Muscetta

Daniele Muscetta — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:16:45 +0000

Yes, I intentionally left the proxy code out, as well as any decent error handling, to be honest: this is meant to be an EXAMPLE, so I wanted to leave IN the code just the mininum important instructions to get it working…
Also, currently I have not found a way in R2 beta to tell the GUI it is supposed to use a proxy… and that's a bit more difficult to add, but in a script, anyway, it is very easy to change just adding the few lines you mentioned.
…in general I hate when people don't include that possibility: http://www.muscetta.com/2007/08/13/why-do-developers-tend-to-forget-about-people-behind-proxy-servers/ )

By: RichardK

RichardK — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:23:09 +0000

Thanks, works great.

Since the company I work at uses a proxy server I had to add the following:

$proxy = New-Object System.Net.WebProxy("http://YOUR_PROXY_SERVER:80")
$proxy.UseDefaultCredentials = $true

$req.proxy = $proxy