KNOWN ISSUE: In the NS log shows 'Force an update of collection....' multiple times per second

Products

• Management Platform (Formerly known as Notification Server)

Issue/Introduction

A customer reported seeing “Force an Update of collection…”  message occurring about every second in their  NS logs.

If a client performs a client configuration update during the time that a resource membership update schedule is running and is supposed to get the "Inventory Agent Plug-in", these messages will be generated for 10 specific filters (collections) .  So if 50 computers in the Inventory Plug-in Install target send configuration updates while resource membership update is running each of these computers will force an update for each of the 10 collections.
These messages don’t occur if a resource membership update isn’t running.

Steps to Duplicate:

1. Disable the Inventory Agent Plug-In policy.
2. Clean the SMP Agent off of a client and repush the agent to it.
3. Allow the agent to update with its client settings.
4. Perform a Delta Membership resource update
5. Enable the Inventory Agent Plug-In policy.
6. Start a Full Membership resource update.
7. Force a configuration update on the client with the Full Membership resource update running
8. Watch the logs.

 

Cause

Known Issue. After analysing the issue we observed that this is not just happening for *Inventory agent plug-in* policy but also for other plug-in policies which uses 'Altiris.Agent.Unix.Policy.UnixAgentInstall' e.g. Software management plug-in policy. Though this happens for these plug-in policies, this membership update is not forced by any of them. This is done by the code 'Altiris.Agent.Unix.Policy.UnixAgentInstall.OnBuildClientConfigXml2()'.

Resolution

This issue has been reported to Symantec Development team. A fix has been provided with ITMS 7.5 and ITMS 7.1 MP1 Rollup v3 and above.

There is a pointfix available for SMP 7.1 SP2, ITMS 7.1 SP2 MP1, ITMS 7.1 SP2 MP. Please contact Support to obtain a copy of it.

 

MINIMUM REQUIREMENT

 

Installed  ITMS 7.1 SP2
Note: Since there were not changes in the code on this area prior to ITMS 7.1 SP2 MP1 Rollup v3, this pointfix will also work installing it on top of ITMS 7.1 SP2 MP1, ITMS 7.1 SP2 MP1 Rollup v1 and Rollup v2.

 

HOW TO INSTALL THIS POINTFIX

 

1.     Retrieve files from the archive called “Pointfix_eTrack 2734162.zip” and extract to the NS hard drive.

2.     Run as administrator “PFinstaller.EXE” (under ‘PFInstalled’ folder), click on ‘Install’ button

3.     Old binaries will be automatically backed up to the same location where PFinstaller is and replaced with the new ones.

4.     Support policy will appear in the 'Settings->Agents/Plug-ins->Symantec Management Agent' folder.
 NB! It must stay enabled to guarantee plug-ins delivery to the new clients.

 

This hotfix has the following known issues:

 

None.

 

How to Uninstall

1. Make sure that Backup folder exists in the same location as PFinstaller.EXE.
2. Run as administrator PFinstaller.EXE, click ‘Uninstall’ button

 

Applies To

Symantec Management Platform 7.1 SP1, SP2
ITMS 7.1 MP1, 7.1 MP1 Rollup v1 and Rollup v2