First, a little background:
The Altiris Software Portal is a website that allows users to request and install software. If you're looking for a quick way to boost ROI in your Altiris investment, the Software Portal's a great way to leverage the infrastructure.
What a user sees when they arrive at the portal page, either by right-clicking the NS Agent icon in the systray, or looking under their Start, Programs, Altiris menu is defined by three critical things:
A. Their Network User ID
B. Their Machine name.
C. The rights and roles they or their machine belong to in the Altiris Security Roles
I consider myself proficient at troubleshooting Software Portal issues. If I were to list a top 5 'usual' reasons why people can't see the portal, MY list would be divided among two categories:
All - Machine Issues: (The portal is, in effect 'down')
A. One of my services on the NS isn't functioning properly - (Client Message Dispatcher Service can be a reliable culprit.)
B. IIS may be down on the NS Rare, but it does happen.
Individual Machine Issues:
A. The machine has not yet completed receiving all of the necessary agents. What ARE the necessary sub-NS agents, you ask? They're the Software Delivery Agent and the Task Sync Agent!
B. The machine isn't on the domain or domain user isn't logged in - This is a one and the same issue, as both elements, in our network, are required to view the portal.
C. The user is not connected to the network. Whether it's a VPN connection missing, or general wireless network problems, if a user can't see your intranet homepage, they're probably not going to see the portal.
So having seen most things, I was stumped today by an interesting issue that I'd like to share.
A user called the helpdesk, stating that the Altiris Software Portal wasn't working. The helpdesk confirmed it with the user, and transfered it to the Altiris group (me).
Here are the steps I normally take to troubleshoot Portal problems.
First, I check the workstation's Resource Summary Page in NS, and confirm that the user has the necessary stub agents
The resource summary window is a great troubleshooting tool for help desk analysts and Altiris Administrators alike.
As you can see, the user has all of the necessary agents required for Software Portal use, and I can also see that the workstation's been checking in regularly, and properly been reporting inventory.
The second step then is to check the local agent logs, to see if anything interesting, or any errors have been seen in software delivery, or inventory agent tasks.
Everything looked great.
Finally, I contacted the user, and used Carbon Copy to access the machine. I right-clicked the agent icon, chose the portal, and nothing happened!
Which led me to Windows, and the Windows shell, and something deeper about how we instantiate the Software Portal in that agent link.
In Windows, there are really only two general places in the registry where invocation of IE happens in the shell for http commands, and the one we use for Software Portal is located under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\HTTP\shell\open\command
The key value should be:
"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -nohome
DISCLAIMER: Be sure to back up the registry before making any changes! (Highlight the entire computer hive, file, export, regback.reg)
NOTE: If you've ever noticed your Software Portal trying to open up in Firefox? It's probably because you have the Firefox executable listed in this registry key on your machine. Just change it to IE and everything will behave as it should.
(In our case, the user had this linked to our old mail system, Lotus Notes(R). )
Once this change was made in the registry, the Software Portal magically started working again - so did links to websites in the user's email client as well.
Hope that helps!