Package Server Agent Path in IIS causes waiting to retry download issues

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

After upgrading to Notification Server SP3, many package servers exhibited the behavior where packages were no longer available for distribution. A previous article, 4295, helped initially; however, the behavior returned.

Resolution

The waiting to retry download issue later returned on several package servers and any clients connected to them, after applying the solution provided in article 4295. It was found that any package server that had been upgraded via the Package Server Agent roll-out policy had this issue.

In resolving that issue, the IIS admin console was opened and the properties of the virtual directory for "PS"—package servers were checked. The local path to the PS agent, C:\PROGRAM FILES\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Package Server Agent, actually contained a tilde (~), representing the 8.1 namespace. Once this was changed to the correct full path, the package servers began functioning again.

However the issue returned once IIS was restarted or refreshed. Two registry keys that set this property on the package server were located. These two registry keys are listed below. Both registry keys contained the tilde (~) in the path. Once this was corrected in both keys, and IIS was restarted, the issue was fixed and did not return.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Package Server]
"PackageServerBaseDir"="C:\\Program Files\\Altiris\\Altiris Agent"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Plugin Objects\Agents\Package Server]
"Install Path"="C:\\Program Files\\Altiris\\Altiris Agent"
"UninstallString"="\"C:\\Program Files\\Altiris\\Altiris Agent\\psinstall.EXE\" remove"