UNC Package downloads hang and cause the OS to hang on shutdown or reboot.

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

A few endpoints in the environment or site servers hang when rebooting on the last step of a patch reboot step.

Environment

ITMS 7.6 HF7

Cause

There may be various causes for these symptoms.  The one that we identified was Microsoft's MRXSMB.sys library leaves connections UNC file download session open.

Resolution

The workaround is use HTTP or HTTPS traffic rather than both IIS and UNC package downloads.

1. Enable HTTP and/or HTTPs traffic in the SMP console if not already enabled.  These settings are found in “Settings>Notification Server>Site Server Settings”.  Then opening Site Server “Settings>Package Service>Package Service Settings” in the left tree view.  Check “Publish web server hosted codebases” and check the appropriate “Publish HTTP codebase” or “Publish HTTPS codebase” as desired.
2. Disable UNC package downloading, changing these two coresettings then enable Altiris HTTP/HTTPS communication. In “C:\ProgramData\Symantec\SMP\Settings\coresettings.config” set the following xml values.  (Note: coresettings.config must be modified with admin access to be successfully saved.)
   1. GenerateNSUNCPackageCodebases = 0
   2. PkgSvrPublishUNC = false
3. ​(Optional) disable UNC port traffic on the SMP.  This would add a layer of insurance against agents that have been offline for a period of time without getting an updated policy.

A fix for this is to install the post ITMS 7.6 hf7 rollups, by upgrading to ITMS 8.0, or by investigating Microsoft UNC library fixes specifically to new version of Mrxsmb.sys and Mrxsmb20.sys (some MSFT documentation can be found at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3031085).  The Symantec post hf7 rollup can be requested through support and referencing bug 3903815.