Some patches which come from patch management are updated on a regular bases. For example MSRT-001. MSRT-001 can be updated every month. A revised EXE is in that case downloaded and placed in the same resource. This can lead to quite a big package after a while.
See the screenshot here:
So the package which normally is around 25 MB can be 290 MB instead. And this is not only on the SMP. This will be distributed to package servers and clients.
There are other examples like SURT-001 where packages and revised packages are even larger.
I have gone through the settings in PM and did not get it to remove this unused EXE files from the packages. I have also went through the support channel and also there I did not get any solution to this problem which does not seem to be a problem. More like a not-so-nice feature :-)
So I thought I can get rid of those files myself and put together a little script which I run as a scheduled task. The same task could also be run whithin the SMP as a scheduled task.
Here the usage of the script:
For example place the file / files locally on you SMP in C:\Temp
The script will create a log file in the same folder where the script is placed and shows you what files were cleaned up.
Patches are stored (in my case) in D:\Program Files\Altiris\Patch Management\Packages\Updates. Can I assume that any patch here, that has multiple sub-folders is prime for this clean-up?
In addition, your script goes to the registry and pulls this path: D:\Program Files\Altiris\Patch Management\Windows\
which isn't the same path at all as what your VBS script uses. Therefore it doesn't seem to clean-up anything.
It started with an incident where all clients where trying to redownload the package when it was updated. At that time the package (MSRT-001) had already grown to 250 MB and for some reason all 250 MB was downloaded again even though the old files have been downloaded once earlier. And have this bulletin applied to up to 10000 computers made the network collaps.....
So long I am only aware about MSRT-001 and SURT-001 which are behaving this way. They might be others. I can add them here if I find more with the same behaviour. If you have any bulletins which behave the same way please be free to post a comment here.
How do you go about deterimining wich bulletins are best to run this against?