SMS 2003 with SP3 my subjective "top 5 deployment issues" [updated!]
Doing recently a pretty distributed (over 100 sites) SMS deployment I stumbled upon several issues. some of them might be FAQs but others were quiet a surprise. Here is my top 5 list;) Hope you can spare yourself time looking for solutions, or help me out, as some still remain unsolved...
1. Automating Central->secondary addresses schedules and rate limits
Unfortunately I was not able to find a solution for this. I could not find any WMI namespace to script the CENTRAL->secondary addresses (schedule, rate limits). The other way around secondary->CENTRAL is easy: all you need to do is set it on one secondary site and by Transfer Site Settings Wizard from SMS admin pack push it out to all other sites.
However each address is duplicated. An entry in addresses on the central site is existent for each secondary site. If someone finds a way to mass update those please let me know!
As you can see in my previous posts I managed to automate almost everything except this part.
2. Server Locator Point does not work as expected - Client Assignment Tool shows "No Site Assignment Found"
This was due to DCOM misconfiguration (as part of W2k3 SP1 lockdown): https://support.microsoft.com/kb/913666
3. Management Point on secondary sites reports "MP Control Manager detected MP is not responding to HTTP requests. The http error is Internal Server Error."
This took me a longer time to analyze, but after analyzing the logs I found out that the group on the SMS SQL DB server, which secondary site servers are members of, had MASTER database as default one. This should be changed to the SMS Database of course. The group does not have login permissions to MASTER db and that is why it was failing.
Unfortunately I was still getting intermittently this error. However I found out in the MPPolicy.log that this was only short periods in time due to network latency between secondary site server and the SMS SQL DB server. I could not find any hack (registry?) to make the SMS site less prone to such low latency networks for Site server->DB communication. If you know of something like this let me know!
4. SP3 asset intelligence knowledge base install fails due to different code page
I attempted to install SP3 on a configuration where the SQL server was on a different machine, had polish collation and polish locale set. The installation of SP3 itself runs fine. There is no error in the SMSSetup.log. however the LU_* tables in SMS db are empty. This causes that the SP3 Software category reports are empty.
I tried directly importing the CSV files (that are extracted during SP3 setup) with bcp.exe. This failed with:
"SQLState = S1000, NativeError = 0
Error = [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Code page 866 is not supported by SQL Server
SQLState = S1000, NativeError = 0
Error = [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Unable to resolve column level collations"
I tried setting OEMCP reg key (https://support.microsoft.com/kb/314010) with no luck. I also was not able to repro this situation (with Polish collation and locale!) in a VM lab setup. I am still troubleshooting this and will keep you updated if I find something, but this error does seem to occur very rarely, though I am not the only one who hit it.
[UPDATE:] This is the solution I got from Maxim Gaufman - my Microsoft colleague from Russia - Thanks a lot Maxim!:
1. Rename bcp.exe to bcpm.exe;
2. Create bcp.cmd in the same folder, with just one line: “bcpm.exe %* -C 1250” ( 1250 is the Polish collation, Russian is 1251);
3. Reinstall Asset Intelligence;
4. Rename bcpm.exe back to bcp.exe and delete bcp.cmd.
What I can add is that if you are running ITMUv3 remember to re-install it after reinstalling SP3 AI: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/937098
5. 100% CPU on SP3 clients during HW inventory
I found out that some computers experienced 100% CPU load during HW inventory. This was the case of https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=937882.