Calls made to ClientTaskServer pages are causing an excessive amount of authentication requests

Products

• IT Management Suite
• Task Server

Issue/Introduction

The customer noticed that their domain controllers were getting over 300,000 authentication events from their ITMS application credentials per hour. (over 9 million in 24 hours). He have it traced back to a certs/SSL/HTTPS call on his Site Servers and SMP server.

The Symantec Management Agent (aka Altiris Agent) logs showed a constant entries referring to pages like:

.../Altiris/ClientTaskServer/Register.aspx
.../Altiris/ClientTaskServer/GetTasks.aspx
.../Altiris/ClientTaskServer/PostStatus.aspx

Cause

A change was done from the default settings under the "Default Website>Altiris>ClientTaskServer> SSL Settings". They had "Accept" instead of "Ignore" under the client certificate section. By default it should be set to "Ignore".

Environment

ITMS 8.5

Resolution

1. Open IIS Manager on each affected Site Server and SMP server
2. Go to Default Website>Altiris>ClientTaskServer> SSL Settings
3. Check that under "Client Certificates" is set to "Ignore"