philipnet

I ran into an intriguing error last week. The Patchinstall.log file looked a bit like the following:

Trying to call Scan Program ...
Unable to VP cache path, Error return (2) ...
Error in getting the scan program name and command line, Scan will not be called ...
Unable to get path for scan program, Agent will not evaluate software updates

I was trying to push out the fix to the Sasser worm to my laptop (*) and was totally puzzled. After a bit of investigation I tracked this down the fact that the Security Update package targeted our Test machines collection, but my laptop was not a member of it. So I put the laptop into our Test machines collection, re-advertised “Security Update” and then re-advertised the Sasser fix.

And to note, if you want SMS to retry pushing out update, get it to re-advertise what ever packages you make alterations to.

*: I use my laptop as a test bed for roll outs. It's already patched up to the very latest, but if SMS doesn't return successful then I know it's not going to work on a wider scale.

Just like to quickly point out that the log files generated by SMS seem to be the only way to figure out what's going on on the client machines - and what's gone wrong. They are located in:
  %windir%\system32\ccm\logs
and in particular I've found that the Patchinstall.log file details the activity of the Software Updates Installation Agent (that's what's responsible for installing patches and what-not).

Before I got started with this blog I thought I would take a few moments to present a bit of background about me and my involvement with SMS2003.

I'm currently an IT Technician in a UK college. I started about four months ago and one of the more interesting points brought up at my interview was SMS. SMS was presented as a technology that could be used for rolling out critical updates, pieces of software and remote control of user's desktop machines. While it was presented as a “you will be working on rolling out SMS” little did I realise just how difficult that would be for me/us to realise.

Currently we've got the client out to most of the machines and from that we can do inventories, scans and remote desktop. But that's it. At one point it was a struggle getting the machines assigned to a site and only yesterday did I finally manage to roll out a critical update to our test machines collection  .

My aim for this blog is to detail the highs and lows of my experience with SMS 2003; to have an easily accessible place of reference for myself, and, hopefully, a resource for other IT Admins who may not have the luxury of time.

I'll leave you with a promise. Just from my work yesterday I have about 4 entries I want to write, all regarding rolling out critical updates. I don't think I will get time to write them all today, so they will get finished off next week.