Inventory and Application Metering Plug-in installers stuck at retrying download

Products

• Client Management Suite
• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

Recently upgraded our Client Management Suite environment to 8.6 HF3 and found that the Inventory and Application Metering plug-ins are not downloading to client systems properly. All other plug-ins were downloaded and installed without issue (including the SMA itself).

We see the following message when the Symantec Agent tries to download the Inventory and Application Metering plug-ins:

"Error while downloading package: No package sources returned by server"

We tried a Full Repair and got the same result. We also did an MSI repair and config on just the Altiris Inventory Solution and got the same result.

Environment

Release: 8.6

Resolution

1. Exported the affected inventory and application metering application package XMLs from our test environment (these were missing in the prod environment).
2. Modified the NS-specific information within the XMLs to match our current production environment.
3. Executed SQL query to verify no codebases were present for the affected plug-ins.
4. Imported modified XMLs into the production environment. Acknowledged message (attached) indicating that the items existed in the NS database, albeit in a different location.
5. Refreshed the console and verified the packages were now appearing in the correct location.
6. Executed an NS.PackageRefresh task on the notification server.
7. Executed SQL query to verify the codebases were created as expected.
8. Enabled the plug-in upgrade task  on multiple systems, then updated the packages on several Site Servers (verifying the plug-in packages downloaded to the Site Servers properly).
9. Logged back in several hours later, confirming the amount of systems pending plug-in upgrades dropped by more than half. Also logged into several test systems and verified proper plug-in version.