Now you can follow your favorite Connect author! Does someone write articles, or create downloads that you find most helpful? You don't want to miss a word and now you can subscribe to that author and receive a notification when new content is published by that person - regardless of the subject or community.

Here's how:

Find a current post by your favorite author and click on "Subscriptions" at the end of the post.
Check the box next to the author's name and click "update"

That's it, you're done!

It took some time for my customer to finish testing the point-fix DLL (because we couldn't validate that the fix worked until it was in production) but we got there in the end.

The point fix is available in SymWise [1] but I wanted to take the opportunity to praise the Altiris Profiler once again (not sure if I did this officially before, but I've always had some good word about it to my customers).

The problem was resolved because I advised my customer to run a profiler trace when they accessed the Sequential task that was failing to load. This allowed us to extract the SQL that was executing (and failing to return results) and run it directly on SQL.

So thanks again to the Altiris Profiler, for letting us get down to a great level of details!

Footnote: I wanted to document the solution on Connect as the problem was also logged here back in 2009 [2].

[1] ...

I am on a remote with a customer on Package Server synchronisation issues.

We have blocked http traffic at the IIS level to only allow requests from one of the 3 unconstrained Package Servers. We are currently updating the package (downloading) at a rate of 2 packages per minutes.

This may look like a good number if the packages were downloading something, but no. We are only downloading the package.xml from the server (served by GetPackageInfo.aspx) and then the snapshot.xml (from the url/unc path provided in the package.xml).

So why is it downloading at such a slow rate? First of all because we reduced the Retry Delay and MaxRetry Delay [1] to the lowest possible values: 1 and 1 (each one minutes). So the AeXNetComms dll doesn't block outgoing requests for up to an hour as per default (in effect this change is benefiting the download rate a lot).

Still, with these aggressive settings in place the PS Agent spends between 50~75% of its time doing...

In 2007, Cabela’s decided to form an Information Security Office and named James Gill to oversee it. With the charter to identify and implement next-generation security and compliance technologies, he and his team have leveraged Symantec technologies as part of the larger transformation they have overseen. An integrated product approach from Symantec is enabling Cabela’s to address everything from data loss prevention, to endpoint security, to compliance, to systems management, to security management issues.

For complete details and links to the podcast click here:  Cabela's, Inc.