Client Management Suite

Good afternoon,

I am wondering if anyone has every seen a behavior where a client fails to execute at a specified remediation time when set to run to close to a Maintenence Window?

Ex. Maintainence Window set to go on client from 9:00 PM - 5 AM.

We have another MSD that doesn't use the MW but is set to run it's remedation schedule at 9:05 PM. we are seeing some clients actually refusing to execute. In the logs we see that it was aware of it earlier in the afternoon but at 9:05 it claims the jb has no valid schedule or future. (FYI, restarting the agent gets it to run)

Has anyone ever seen this or are there any thoughts on this? We saw this on about 12% of a large distribution test.

See log entries below:

At 3:05PM today, WPWKCT022076001 was aware that the OD Vid job was pending:

<event date='Jan 04 15:05:03' severity='4' hostName='WPWKCT022076001' source='CDeliveryPolicy::GetNextWakeup()' module='smfagent.dll' process='AeXNSAgent.exe' pid='124' thread='2940' tickCount='46690334' >

  <![CDATA[Policy BR_MSD VidCopy Video({A2B3388C-B133-4DFA-BC8C-49D235FA84E6}) due at: 1/4/2015 9:05:00 PM]]>

</event>

But at 9:05PM, it has had some sort of memory lapse, and says there’s no valid schedule, so doesn’t execute the job…

<event date='Jan 04 21:05:00' severity='4' hostName='WPWKCT022076001' source='CDeliveryPolicy::GetNextWakeup()' module='smfagent.dll' process='AeXNSAgent.exe' pid='124' thread='2940' tickCount='68288345' >

  <![CDATA[Policy BR_MSD VidCopy Video({A2B3388C-B133-4DFA-BC8C-49D235FA84E6}) has no valid future scheduled run time (other than logon or startup schedules).]]>

</event>

Our next test will be set to run a bit later than when the MW opens up. Just to try to rule out it is related in any way.

Thanks

DCHAD

Hi DCHAD

Which version of ITMS you are using?

Regards,
Dmitri

Dmitri,

7.1, the latest code with R7. We've been in touch with support and they are telling us that they have seen behavior where the Software Management piece can literally stop firing tasks unless the agent is restarted.  This makes it very difficult to execute on 12,000 endpoints with the small window we have.

We ran a 2nd test and moved the MSD out 30 minutes to 9:45.Howver we also rebooted a couple thousand endpoints that had issue sin our previous test. Our results were much better this time but we don;t know if it was the reboots or moving the remediation time out. We also added an additional compliance schedule to fire 15 min before the 9:45 execution.

Have you ever heard of this issue where a client can get into this 'Lazy' state?

Thanks

DCHAD

Hi DCHAD,

Thank you for your answer.

I don't hear  about 'Lazy' state, but I heared about similar problems in the old versions of ITMS.

ITMS 7.1 R7 can have some issues related to scheduling. Many scheduling issues resolved in the latest  rollup (R11) for 7.1 SP2 MP1 or in the latest version of ITMS (7.5 SP1).

Regards,

Dmitri

We had problems with MSD policies when the remediation was set to a scheduled time. Execution would never happen and the software would not install. At this time, we do not have maintenance windows setup.

We were told by support that there is a bug in MSD and choosing to remediate at an exact time (bug should be fixed in 7.6). In our example case we were pushing out the latest SEP client and didn’t want computers rebooting during business hours. With an exact time set for remediation we never could get an install to execute. For a work around we ended up setting remediation to “Immediately” and used a batch file for the install command. In the batch file we check for the current time and get the current hour of the time. Then we check to see if the hour is greater than 4 (if true, it would be 5:00 am or later). If the hour is greater than 4, the script exits and no software install happen. If the hour is 4 or less (Midnight to 4:59 am), we execute setup.exe from within the batch file. For us, the time format is 24 hour and this has worked well.

Only down side to this we found is reports for the MSD. Since the batch file is executed, the reports indicate successful whether or not the software was actually installed from the batch file.