Unable to get SMA file downloaded. Getting error: HTTP status 416: The server could not satisfy the range request (0x8FA101A0)

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

The customer is unable to get the Altiris Agent (Symantec Management Agent) downloaded on new client machines when trying to PUSH it from the SMP Console.
The customer attempts to push the agent software to the client but fails to get past 0kb.
The customer said that this process worked just fine previously.

We have noticed the following (based on the logs and conversation):

1. The issue only occurs with new client machines with no agent in the past. If the client machine has the agent already installed, the upgrade process goes just fine and no complains on getting the agent files.
2. The AeXNSC.log shows:

2017-12-27 11:05:11 P:852 T:4960 INFO HttpOperations: Event was sent successfully to 'HTTP://MySMPServer.com:80/Altiris/NS/Agent/PostEvent.asp';
2017-12-27 11:05:11 P:852 T:4960 INFO InstallService: Downloading agent installer from URL
'http://MySMPServer.com:80/Altiris/NS/NSCap/Bin/Win32/X86/NS Client Package/AeXNSC.exe' using profile settings
2017-12-27 11:05:11 P:852 T:4960 INFO HttpOperations: Failed to download file
from 'http://MySMPServer.com:80/Altiris/NS/NSCap/Bin/Win32/X86/NS Client Package/AeXNSC.exe', error: HTTP status 416: The server could not satisfy the range request (0x8FA101A0)
2017-12-27 11:05:11 P:852 T:4960 INFO InsallService: Retrying download after 60 seconds...

INFO HttpOperations: Failed to download file from 'http://MySMPServer.com:80/Altiris/NS/NSCap/Bin/Win32/X86/NS Client Package/AeXNSC.exe', error: HTTP status 416: The server could not satisfy the range request (0x8FA101A0)

Environment

They upgraded from 7.6 HF7 to 8.1 RU4.

Cause

For whatever reason, the customer's environment was sending "Accept-Ranges:  none" responses when we were trying to download the Symantec management agent package on new machines.
The server replies say that it does not support range requests (see Accept-Ranges: none header below), but our downloader works only with range requests so it fails. Using wireshark trace this is what was noticed:

HEAD /Altiris/NS/NSCap/Bin/Win32/X86/NS%20Client%20Package/AeXNSC.exe HTTP/1.1
Host: MySMPServer.com
Cache-Control: max-age=0
X-SMA-Version: 8.1.4528.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 18943576
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Last-Modified: Sat, 11 Nov 2017 00:56:22 GMT
Accept-Ranges:  none
ETag: "07f3ae4875ad31:0"
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE10
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2018 01:05:12 GMT

Resolution

This issue has been reported to the Symantec Development team. A change has been done in our downloader to implement range-less downloads for ::GetFile(). This change would be introduced in ITMS 8.1 RU6 release and later.