Spent the last couple of hours looking into an issue with the Altiris 6 Helpdesk. As I couldn't find the issue reported elsewhere, and its bitten me before I thought I'd just pop this in the blog.

In summary,  be aware that for practical purposes the limit for attachment filenames in the Altiris Helpdesk is 63 characters.  If you are using Microsoft Exchange for your enterprise email services, internal users mailing into the helpdesk with attachment filenames exceeding this limit will have their attachment silently dropped.

The evidence of a ticket having a dropped attachment is found in ticket history: it will state that ‘the following attachments were added:’ in the incident update without stating the filename (as would normally be the case).

The workaround we put in place is to have helpdesk email going to an mailbox which is then automatically forwarded to the helpdesk. This allows our...

One of my customer reported a problem that caused one of their child nothing server to run at 100% CPU and consume almost all memory (out of 32GiB available).

I first looked at the timing (it was reported last Friday) and I thought this was possibly linked to the PMImport release as last week we had Patch Tuesday (so we released the PMImport Wednesday and replicated it to the child server Thursday evening.

But this was not it. First the memory ballooning problem happened on 3 different processes: the w3wp pools for the Altiris-NS-Agent and TaskManagement as well as the AeXSvc itself.

With all three processes running we would see large chunks of memory being released in a clean drop and go right back up in after nice curve. This was because the 3 processes were fighting for the scarce memory resources and causing each other to have to be scavenged every now and then.

Stopping on of the application pool pegged the memory to ~12 GiB for each of the other...

To create a good product it requires lots of talent, great team work, and really good communication. To have a great product, the entire team needs to be focused and driven.

Up to this point, Symantec has some of the best sales people, a good Sales Engineering group, decent technical support team, but where is the communication with the Dev group? How come we never hear from those guys? Are they locked away and not getting the feedback from the users?

This will be our 7th week with the Symantec SMP 7.1 MP1 product, and while 90%+ of the suite is working or workable, we continue to have imaging issues. While i'm optimistic that Symantec has the resources to resolve our issues, it's rather unfortunate that the basic functions do not work out of the box. At least not reliably, which their 6.x version did without any issues. 

So moving on to next week, focusing on the same imaging issue, but with more detailed problems:

1. Deploy Anywhere will...

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