Symantec Management Platform (Notification Server)

If I were to use the Remote Altiris Agent Diagnostics utility on any given day to check on the health of my agents I would always find some agents that stopped checking for configuration updates, sending basic inventory, etc.  Not a ton of clients, but enough to be a concern.  When I look at the agent logs I'll aways see these same entries repeating over and over:

<![CDATA[CTAgent::OnExecute-Loop(): CAtrsException exception, error = "Unable to start thread", OS error = 8, at line 154 ...

<![CDATA[CTaskAgentBase::ProcessNewSettings(): The settings are the same.]]></event>

Resetting the Task Agent doesn't do any good - the only "fix" is to restart the Symantec Management Agent and then it starts working just fine.  The only reference to these log entries I could find were in a pcAnywhere plug-in troubleshooting document (http://www.symantec.com/business/support/resources/sites/BUSINESS/content/staging/TECHNICAL_SOLUTION/121000/TECH121972/en_US/5.0/Troubleshooting%20pcAnywhere%20Solution%20plug-in%20Deployment_V1.0.pdf?__gda__=1285353016_0ba8b6219224a3df16c38b2c9458f50a) and in that document they only say that these messages indicate a problem with a Site Server.

Assuming that the issue is indeed being caused by a Site Server, does anyone know exactly what that cause would be?  I've taken steps to deal with stopped agents, but this issue is just annoying because agents are not in a stopped stated.  They're just no longer doing anything and need to be restarted.

I'm seeing the exact same issue. I haven't determined an exact count yet, but based on some random sampling, it's nearing 5% of my agents. That's not insignificant. I'm not sure I believe it's the fault of a site server. I've seen this in many of my sites ( I have ~ 50 task servers ) and at the primary site which runs off the Notification Server.

I need to open a ticket, but first I need to really evaluate how many machines I have in this state. I haven't really found a good report that would be an indicator since the machines failing to run tasks could either be offline or in this odd state.

jessek, have you checked the logs on the site server(s) the failing agents are connecting to?  This is a task server agent, so you'll be wanting to look at the task server they are registered to(or not quite registered to, but trying).

There's a known issue, perhaps just in SP5, but perhaps remaining from existing releases:

System.Net.Sockets.SocketException observed while trying to restart the Task server services (Altiris Object Host service)

In some cases the agent cannot register with task server, preventing users from running tasks on agent computers.

This is a known issue for this release and is under investigation.

Does the task server have any clues?

I haven't been able to pin this one down at all.  I did find a Windows-related issue on one task server where my performance counters weren't working right, but I fixed that.  I'm still seeing this warnings on agents all the time.  I'm having to constantly check agent health and reset agents where necessary.  The next thing I'll try doing is build another SS with just the TS role and remove the TS role from my primary PS.  Maybe I'm overwhelming that thing - I really don't know.

I'm seeing similar issues. Out of 1100 clients, about 200 are not getting the task. When I check the task intance details for failed servers I usually get

"An error was returned from the handler for this task. ""

Agents appear to be functioning, but not recieving tasks. In some cases, the Monitor agent is not updating either.

Does anyone have any suggestions for troubleshooting and remediating this?

I'm having the same issue.  If I run my task's VBScript locally on the workstation it returns the values and updates SMP's DB.

However the same as the rest of you when I run the task against the workstation it doesn't even pick it up.  Send a job to it no probs.

What I was thinking, could it have something to do with the Site Server maybe ?  We have updated our NS to SP5 and i'll have to question our SS is at SP5.

Has anyone had any leads to what the cause is yet ?

I too saw this issue, right after upgrading to SMP 7 SP5.  It seems like making sure the Site Server's Task Server agent is updated addressed it.

Hi, new to the forum but experiencing the same issue...Altiris logs on affected servers are littered with "unable to start thread" errors and the aexnsagent process is continually running at around 50 - 80%.

Eventually the server will run out of resources and become unresponsive.

Was interested in powellbc's post. I have determined that the client task agent version on the affected host is ahead of the version installed on the Notification Server. The Client Task Server Agent on the NS is v 7.0.7416 but the Client Task Agent on the affected host(s) is 7.0.7418.

Not sure how they would be out of sync but you mentioned that this was the cause of your issue. Are there any obvious bugs with version 7.0.7418 that might cause me greater issues should I update the NS?

What is the current release version of the client agents for 7.0?

Thanks in advance,

Simon