E03020028 Permission denied on harvest.sig or .harvest.sig during promotion

Products

• CA Harvest Software Change Manager
• CA Harvest Software Change Manager - OpenMake Meister

Issue/Introduction

Promotion of packages from one environment to another (e.g., DEVL to TEST) fails with permission errors even after directory permissions are verified as writable. The following errors appear in the Harvest logs:

• E03020028: Permission denied. It might have no access, can't replace read_only file or the file is being used by another process.
• E03060019: Process Execute failed. Process Name: Check Out for Browse

The "Check Out Summary" section may be missing from the logs, and while the package might be marked as promoted, files do not appear in the target directory.

Environment

CA Harvest Software Change Manager v14.x

Cause

The harvest.sig (or .harvest.sig on Linux and Unix) signature file in the target directory is set to read-only or has become corrupted. This prevents the Harvest agent from updating the synchronization records during the checkout phase of the promotion. These signature files are often inadvertently changed to read-only during server migrations, permission resets by external teams, or if they are accidentally checked into the Harvest repository.

Resolution

Follow these steps to restore the promotion process:

1. Navigate to the target directory on the remote agent server (e.g., /####/####/####/student/sql).
2. Locate the hidden signature file: harvest.sig or .harvest.sig.
3. Delete the signature file from the target directory.
4. Ensure that the signature file is not currently checked into any Harvest repository; if it is, remove it to prevent it from being deployed as read-only in future promotions.
5. Re-run the promotion process.

Harvest automatically recreates a new, writable signature file during the next successful checkout.