Today one of our software packagers had an issue. One of his packages was not having it's distribution point updated correctly. The error in the Altiris Logs was as follows,
Unexpected exception occurred when running Manage Distribution Points for package 26ff6c0c-88d5-4b15-a462-a25804bfaa4e Access to path '\\mypackageserver\JobSource\Apps\DWG_Trueview_2014\19.1.18.0\Program Files\DWG TrueView 2014\Support\africa.map' has been denied.
At first, I thought it was a path issue. But, the path length was fine. We even tried moving the .map file around, and the error just followed it.
At first, we thought it was a client issue -the packager's machine. The .map file on his machine had the type ISWI.MAP (Install Shield Windows Installer MAP file) which was unusual for us, so I checked if anything was keeping the .map file open using Mark Russinovich's Handle, but nothing.
All very odd. Got him to close down his machines to pay him back for annoying me with this puzzle, and nothing.
Next I tried creating a new UNC package, just containing the one dummy file ian.map to see what would happen.. And the error appeared for this package too...
Unexpected exception occurred when running Manage Distribution Points for package 4af182ed-fab9-42a1-bcd0-6c4b29f8ee38 Access to path '\\mypackageservers\Jobsource\Apps\_Ian_test\ian.map' has been denied.
So, at the moment... we are puzzled. Something is certainly getting in the way of these files whilst the distribution point update is in progress. To resolve we'll likely zip up these map files to workaround this. Major pain... unless anyone has any clues?
Hi Clay and AltirisJunkie,
This was the tech note that support provided to us... which they were hopeful that we would upgrade first to HF5 before applying. This morning we tackled this with process monitor and established the root cause (and with it a solution).
When the Altiris Service scans the UNC path for the software package, it wants to create copies of any .map files it encounters as .aexns_map. If the service does not have the rights to create these copies, it will fail to index the package and generate this unexpected error. I guess this is to get around the IIS restrictions on delivering .map files.
In our case, the simplest resolution is to give the smp service write permissions to any software package folders that contain files with the .map extension. Once we did this, the distribution point update process completed without error and the packages started to flow.
Ian
There is a tech article about this that I ran across due to having the same issue.
http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH228243
We initially noticed it when the Job/Task would not copy down the MAP files to the client for the install to occur but then found the article and went from there.
There is no attachement but support was able to give me the pointfix.
Basicallyt its just a new Altiris.NS.StandardItems.dll that needs to registered and it will fix the issue with the .MAP files.
We no longer have the issue of the files getting copied downnor do we get the Unexpected Exception error int he logs but the SMP is still cloning and renaming the .MAP files for some reason. No effect due to it.
For instance, the file africa.map gets copied and renamed to africa.aexns_map in the same directory.
Very funny behavior :)
Hope this helps.
Clay
Hi Jared,
We did have a think about this with respect to IIS, but this error is at the point where it's trying to access the package on the UNC path ... so this is all before any HTTP download by clients or package servers.
We have SMP7.5SP1 installed without any hotfixes. Support have suggested we patch to HF5 and then apply a point fix... but am struggling to see the root cause. Still investigating....
Not sure if it would be related but .MAP is a mimetype that IIS is configured to handle as text/plain. Maybe removing the mimetype would help (assuming you don't need it for some other website being hosted on that box of course)? Just a shot in the dark.