Client Management Suite

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1 week in 

Jan 14, 2013 09:27 AM

Items completed:

3 SMP servers, 1 parent, 2 child with hierchy completed.

SQL maintenence plan created per Symantec recommendations.

AD import completed.

Subnets manually created(We are using the 8 scheme which would have been tough to import)

Tested PCAnywhere functions, decent product, not very good at screen aspect ratios for such a mature product. Very bare bones?

Only issues are: 1 server had to be respun in VM and rebuilt becuase of various strange errors with SMP agent. Also some Java oddities when importing OS files, which thankfully can be bypassed by simply pressing cancell to the credential challenge(This was on XP and 7 desktops with the Symantec's proposed GP configuration in palce. But that error still persisted, attached is the photo of the error, on an XP machine you can press cancell and continue with the file upload).

The design of the product still irks me a bit for the options on Site Servers. Even with fiber to everything and repositories on the San, we still "HAVE TO" replicate all of the packages along with the Software Manager's own repository of the files. Which makes this 6 copies of the same thing(Software, patch, images). Also the fact that on the Parent server you dont see the Site Servers for the Child makes the Visio-ish diagram useless to show corporate infrustructure.

So far we have not seen much errors in the logs, hopefully I'm no jinxing my self by also stating no support calls had to be logged.

 

This week, the plans are to have a Patch management configuration and building up the DS to replicate our 6.9 setup. Which will be about 200+ packages and various build jobs with a Win7 and WinXP image which will contain some applications along with SEP and Altiris 7.x agent built in.

 

 

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Jan 15, 2013 03:15 PM

It was scheduled way ahead of time, plus do we really want to be the 7.5 beta tester?

 

 

Jan 15, 2013 12:04 PM

we're still on 7.1 sp1 since there are apparently some big DB changes between sp1 and sp2, and we can't afford the downtime of rebuilding and fixing packages because of what should be a simple upgrade.  

 

how come you didn't wait till 7.5?

Jan 15, 2013 10:00 AM

Gibson99, are you running mp1??

 

We had a major boo boo here, huge task fixing the damages right now.

Jan 14, 2013 02:02 PM

it's probably a replication issue between servers.  we don't have heirarchy here, but we have CONSTANT problems with the Patch Windows System Assessment Scan package.  it updates daily (it's the package that helps patch figure out which machines need which patches), and it fails to replicate down to the package servers so often that i've created a repeating DS job that actually deletes the package then restarts the SMP agent service on each package server every day around 3am, to force it to get the latest version of the package.  i also have an automation task running in NS7 to check the version on the pkg server versus the version on the NS and send us an email if there's a mismatch, so we can proactively fix it.

 

the reason i went to all that trouble (ns automation task + DS job) is because if this system assessment package dies/hangs/etc, then the package server stops downloading ANY packages.  clearing out this broken pkg and restarting the service allows it to fix itself... till it breaks again.  which is why i have it running daily.  if the package isn't broken, my script just quits silently without deleting files or restarting the service, to minimize interruptions.

 

one way to check if this is your issue is to open the agent on a given package server (or perhaps on the child server too - i don't know what it looks like for you), then look at the package server tab to see if there are any downloading/retrying or invalid packages.  i wish you could sort them by package status by clicking the column header, but you just have to sit there and scroll thru all 3000+ packages (including all your patches) to find any that say retrying or package is invalid.  

 

as for the duplication for all your packages - can you or the server guys configure the SAN to do block- or file-level de-duplication so you're not wasting all that space?  that ought to be fairly easy to to and will not only free the space, but shouldn't impact speed at all since your SAN is pretty nice from what i remember.

Jan 14, 2013 09:33 AM

Added pic for the Hierchy view in the Parent Server. As you can see with the Server name blanked out, there is no other details? How useful is this view?

 

Also as you can see by the red indicating errors over the weekend?

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