30 October 2015

SCCM deployment with Error 1612

I was deploying a package earlier today. It took a few iterations to get everything correct. All of a sudden on the fourth update of the package, it would no longer install. It continuously failed. I thought maybe something was wrong with the installer that got downloaded to the machine, so I cleared out the cache. The issue persisted after SCCM re-downloaded the package. I then ran the install manually from the ccmcache folder where it was stored. Everything installed perfectly. I then deleted the application completely from SCCM and re-deployed it as a Package with the same issue. I was stumped at this point. All of my msi installations include a verbose log written to a specific directory on each machine. When I looked at the file, the first thing that was indicated in red was SOURCEMGMT: Failed to resolve source. I scrolled up and all of a sudden it popped out to me when I saw SOURCEMGMT: Trying source C:\windows\ccmcache\1t\emsProfiler\. That directory no longer existed. I knew this because I had manually run the installed from a different directory in the CCMCACHE. At this point, I thought that had to be stored in the registry and it was. It was located under HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Installer\Products\{GUID}\SourceList.

I deleted HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Installer\Products\{GUID}, which included everything underneath it. I reran the installation and it installed correctly. 

Failed to connect to remote distribution point

We recently did a complete upgrade on all equipment in one of our remote offices. After the upgrade, I had to setup a new distribution point. I began by using Prajwal Desai's blog post on setting up a remote distribution point. I went through all of his process three times and still no sucess. It was constantly returning ERROR DPConnection::ConnectWMI() - Failed to connect to  <server>. error = 0x800706ba. Other suggestions on this error had been to check the firewall and make sure certain IIS components were enabled. Finally, I ran across this post that fixed it. When I added the primary SCCM server name to the local administrators group on the remote distribution site server, it fixed it. It was now able to install the DP with no problems.

19 October 2015

Missing Windows Updates in Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2

Recently, we had a software deployment that required .Net Framework 4.5.2. I deployed the .Net update via SCCM 2012 Software Updates. Within a day, it showed most all systems were now compliant. We were ready to begin testing the deployment of the application upgrade. My colleague came back to me the next day and said the app would not install because 4.5.2 was missing. I began investigating and SCCM still showed it was compliant. We found more and more systems which were missing the .Net. After finally realizing it was not anything that I might have done wrong in the update deployment, I went to a system and manually ran the Windows updates. It was at this point I saw the system was 88 updates behind. The SCCM client had been sending false data back to the SCCM server. I spent much of the evening investigating and finally ran across KB3050265. I downloaded the patch and installed it on my test machine. Low and behold, a bunch of updates appeared in Software Center after running a Software Updates Scan Cycle and a Software Updates Deployment Evaluation Cycle. Had we not been deploying an application that required .Net 4.5.2, we could have gone a long time thinking the updates were deployed. This issue is sporadic, at least in my firm. Some machines were fully patched, while others were not.

NOTE: This was superseded by KB3102810 last November and then by KB313