Schannel Certification errors in Windows System Event logs for ITMS

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

Schannel Communication errors appear in the Windows System Event Logs indicating that there's a communication failure between the Symantec Management Platform (SMP) and the Agent.

Source: Schannel
EventID: 36884
User: SYSTEM

The certificate received from the remote servers does not contain the expected name. It is therefore not possible to determine whether we are connecting to the correct server. The server name we were expecting is FQDN. The SSL connection request has failed. The attached data contains the server certificate.

Also, the Attached Cert has no data.

Environment

ITMS 8.x

Cause

The cause of Schannel errors is Schannel module and the Agent’s HTTPS transport uses this system module to perform the SSL handshake. The Agent itself does not have
control over certificates, as Schannel fully controls which certificates to use and it logs the error when it cannot find the proper certificate.

The certificate has to be registered with the agent, currently this isn't possible, the Agent has no idea whether or not it has a certificate; because the certificate isn't installed on the Agent, but on the target computer. As a result the Agent returns no data, creating the Schannel Error.

Resolution

The error message can be safely ignored, this is a known issue to be fixed in a future release.

There is a Workaround provided by Microsoft to disable the Schannel messages from appear in the Event log as documented in the following:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260729

Another work around is to install the Root certificate from the SMP on the Agent. This will stop the Schannel errors in the Windows logs.

The certificate can be exported from IIS on the SMP as a .pfx, then uploaded into target agent settings Advanced tab.