Permissions Required for Agent Maintenance Mode

I had a few emails regarding the Agent Maintenance Mode not working for some. It appears that there are a few reasons for this not to work correctly:

1. System Center Essentials 2010 that uses Opsmgr 2007 R2 but they have still don’t include the powershell support (Thanks to Bjorn Axell for this info)

2. The Default Action Account on the RMS must be a member of the Operations Manager Administrators Group. If you configured the action account by using Local System or a user that is not part of the Operations Manager Administrators Group, the script will not work.
This is a standard configuration for several MPs including the Opeartions Manager MP and the Active Directory MP.

New Agent Maintenance Mode

Here is a new version of the Agent Maintenance Mode MP. This version is only for OpsMgr R2 as it leverages the new powershell modules only available in R2.

--Update--
Read this post if this is not working for you -Permissions Required for Agent Maintenance Mode
The readme has also been updated with this info
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To recap on this solution:
It allows you to start Maintenance Mode from an monitored server using just a vbscript. Using this requires absolutely no permissions in Operations Manager. All of the components required to have this function are part of a standard OS with an agent installed. It works through Gateways so can be used in firewalled or untrusted environments.

The MaintMode.vbs writes an event to the event log that indicates the length of time Maintenance Mode should remain on. This is picked up by the management pack and processed on the RMS to turn on Maintenance Mode for that server. The on time can be specified in days, hours or minutes.

Download here

The zip file contains a Readme with more information and usage instructions.

Highligh of changes in this version:
Management Pack Changes
* Added Powershell modules in MP (R2 feature) to replace scripts on RMS. Some logic reworking in scripts
* Support for Server 2008
* Fixed ON/Off logic to not put Health Service and Health Service Watcher in to Maint Mode as R2 puts HS and HSW in to MM automatically
• Added Maint Mode event collection rules
• Added Schedule Maint Mode text file option at C:\MaintenanceModeSchedule.txt - origional by Steve Rachui - http://blogs.msdn.com/steverac/archive/2008/12/09/maintenance-mode-by-config-file.aspx
* Disables discovery on RMS as Maintenance Mode should not be used on RMS

MaintMode.vbs
* Now logs the username in the event log of who turned it on: “Maintenance Mode: ON for 6 hour(s): 360 . Turned on by domain\user”
* Adds registry markers to indcate current status under HKLM/Software/OpsMgr/Maintenance Mode. Can be used by patching tools.
* Added STATUS option that reads current status from registry.