Patch Management Solution

Today when I was doing some staging of updates I noted that my Java policies (all of them) had lost software bulletin location?  Further investigation and a ticket to Symantec I Later discovered that the Sun Microsystem vendor had been removed from the vendor list by Symantec accidently.  When the vendor was removed it purged all my Java bulletins. 

This is more of a FYI for those of you who may not have noticed it yet!!

Good catch on this.  Was just reviewing my policies and noticed they were gone.

I just found out all our Java policies, bulletins and updates were also delete here... I'm out of words to express how angry I am about this... We are in pilot for a very complicated Java migration for 12000 users and we lost everything... 

I am sorry to hear that this caused major setbacks. To provide publication; this issue was documented in KM: TECH218556 on 6/20/2014 and updated that the SolutionSam site is back in order.

Moving forward: If you have a recent backup of the database; restore to date prior to data corruption, for that will provide the lost package/policy resource associations in the database. Physical packages may need to be redownloaded via the PRC, but they should deploy without failure on existing policies. 

Additionally, unless any recently excluded vendors are to be removed from the environment; disable the 'Delete previously downloaded data for vendors, software and languages that are now excluded' setting on the Import Patch Data for Windows. If the data uploading fails for any reason in the future for random vendors; this will ensure the data already in place will not be cleared. 

Please subscribe to the KM articles pertaining to Patch Management, for you will receive email notifications of Patch related issues as they are publicized.

Sincerely,

Joshua

Thanks for the tip to remove the checkmark on "Delete previously downloaded..."

On a side note, since you work for Symantec could you bring internally that a full restore is not a valid solution, it is a disaster for many of your clients.  An SMP server becomes increasingly complex with the more solutions you use and you quickly get a hundred people doing changes 24/7.  We need a way to be able to restore just a few lost objects (ex: tasks, policies) without having to rebuild a full server and export/import what we need.

Thank you and have a good day!

Again, apologies for this major inconvenience this has caused you.

Please keep in mind that the upload of the PMImport is live, and the uploaded data was unforseeably corrupted, and that is where the problem originated. Therefore, there is no true resolution to any data already lost in an environment that has already downloaded the corrupt data.

Moving forward; disabling the setting to 'Delete previously downloaded...,' unless one is using that to clean up the environment when exclusions need to be implemented for updates no longer needed, is the best preventive measure.

The full database restore is a great way to recover the lost data, hence it was added to the KM article. Unfortunately, in your environment, you will need to review with the other Altiris Admins and see what the best time saver for your group would be, for this advice was merely to assist with data loss recovery and is a solid resolution if able to be performed, but it goes without saying that it will impact on the enviornment.

Additionally, the policies and package resource associations are stored in the database, and the restore would bring them back into the Console. The manual download of the Patch Packages may be in order if a package clean up process removed those, but they should be in tact on default: C:\Program Files\Altiris\Patch Management\Packages\Updates. Nothing more would need to be performed.

Please let me know if there are any remaining concerns and I will be happy to help.

Sincerely,

Joshua