Altiris Services continually stop and cannot be restarted due to content in NSEs

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

After upgrading to SMP 8.5 the Altiris Client Message Dispatcher Service would immediatly stop when started.  It also knocked the Altiris Service off line so that it would not start or stay started.
 

 

There are NO error messaged generated in the SMP logs to give a hint about what caused the problem.

Environment

Management Platform 8.5
 

Cause

An NSE had an entry for one computer object whose OS information was as follows:

“Samba Version 3.0.35, Likewise Version 5.2.0-48874p”

A flaw in the database schema (number of characters expected), and also how the data loader handles it, caused the services to be knocked offline.

Resolution

This issue has been reported to Symantec Development team. A fix has been added to the next release (8.1 RU1).

Also, there is a pointfix available for 8.1 RU7. See INFO5191