Ghost Solution Suite

Hi all,

We've installed GSS 2.0 to aid in migrating from Windows 2000 to XP. After upgrading to 2.0.1 and realising that the machine originally used for the Console server had network problems, we installed the Console on another machine and successfully used the Remote Client Install procedure on most of the machines on our network. However, for two machines an error occurred after the console reported a successful installation. The error advised that the INSERT statement into the Ghost database had failed, due to a "Syntax error or access violation".

This didn't happen for any of the other client installations, even one I successfully tried after this error occurred. However, when attempting to reinstall the client on these machines, the installation again executes correctly but the machines do not appear in the Console. There is no error when retrying. I'm going to try manually removing the Ghost client and then trying the installation again, but has anyone encountered this problem before? I connected to the Ghost database and confirmed that the MachineID values being used in the INSERT statements that failed do not already exist, so that's not a problem.

For reference, here's the message from the event log (it wasn't entered into any of the Ghost Console logs that I could find); the message for the second machine was identical save for the PC details and timestamp:

Event Type:    Information
Event Source:    Application Popup
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    26
Date:        9/05/2007
Time:        3:35:00 PM
User:        N/A
Computer:    SCA1530
Description:
Application popup: Symantec Ghost Configuration Server : INSERT INTO MachineView(Description, ParentID, RootID, MachineID) VALUES ('SCA1251 - Carmel.O'Hehir', 1, 1, 39):42000 [Sybase][ODBC Driver]Syntax error or access violation

Well, rats. Looks like when the code that adds machines was moved from the console to the configuration server the new version didn't use a parameterised query - so that the quote mark in the machine name is messing things up. The fix is a trivial one-liner, I'll try and get a build done to fix this as soon as possible (which will be tomorrow at the earliest since this came through after I left the office).

Ah...I should have spotted that. It makes perfect sense, since the user on the other machine which could not be added also has an apostrophe in his username. Thanks for getting on to this, I look forward to the fix.

The test build which should hopefully fix this is done, so if you e-mail me at nigel dot bree at gmail dot com I'll let you know how to get a replacement ngserver.exe that you can test to see that it fixes the problem.

Thanks to Nigel for the test build; it eliminates this error. The machines in question did turn up in the console, though some poking about in the GSS database showed the reason for this: the original error prevented an entry for the machine in the NORTON_MachineView table (which stores the information displayed as an icon in the Console) in the GSS database, but not in NORTON_Machine (which stores the basic machine information - ID, MAC address, etc). This meant that even though subsequent installations of the client were successful, they still didn't show up in the Console because it saw the machines were already in the database and so didn't re-add them.

A configuration refresh also failed, presumably because there was no existing NORTON_MachineView record to update.

Manually deleting the affected machines' rows from the NORTON_Machine table fixed this problem, though, and both machines have now been added successfully without any errors.

Thanks Nigel for all your help!