SMS and MOM Supportability

Has your Management Point Failed to Reinstall?

My name is Brent Dunsire and I am Supportability Program Manager here at Microsoft working on Systems Management Server.  In the spirit of this Blog I hope to bring you awareness, and solutions, to commonly seen issues with SMS 2003.  I’d like to start by bringing as many folks up to date regarding an issue which has frustrated many of us for some time.

In Systems Management Server 2003 many actions trigger a reinstall of the Management Point and that Management Point may fail to reinstall.  This has been an all too common experience for those with MP’s utilizing IIS 6.0 where the MP reinstallation failure manifests with the following error as found in the MPSetup.log:

<< Setup was unable to create the Internet virtual directory CCM_System  The error code is 80020009 >>

This error has most often been linked to SMS related entries being orphaned in the IIS Metabase. While a reinstall of IIS will most certainly clear this out and optionally - editing of the Metabase to remove those entries could be conducted to correct this - that is an aggressive and unnecessary step which will do little to ensure its return upon the next MP reinstallation.

This problem has been found to be due to a flaw in IIS 6.0 which is detailed in this recently released Knowledge Base article for SMS:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918324/en-us

This SMS specific article will provide you details on this issue as well as direct you to an IIS 6.0 hotfix which should prevent this problem from occurring, and which once applied will also allow a failed MP reinstall attempt to then reinstall successfully with out manual Metabase edits or IIS reinstallations. 

Brent G. Dunsire

Supportability Program Manager

Systems Management Server and SCRM

Are you using the correct scan tool?

In Manageability, one of our top issues and areas of customer pain in the SMS space is around the incorrect scan tool being used with software updates.  This is a big call generator and our highest area of critical situations (CritSits) with Premier customers.  The issue manifests itself with patches not being detected and/or patches not being installed.

One way to keep yourself informed on which scan tool to use can be found in the monthly Detection and Deployment Guidance articles.  You can always find the link to the current month's article in the monthly Security Bulletin Summaries (current month is always here ... http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/default.mspx).  The link to the Deployment Guidance article is under the DEPLOYMENT section of the bulletin.

You can also see the full list of monthly detection and deployment guidance articles here ... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910723

In each article, there is a table which summarizes detection and deployment guidance for each security patch.  

New KBs on Top Issues

Issues with MOM 2005 used with SQL 2005 reporting services.  When you try to import a Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 report file by using the Import/Export Management Pack option or the RptUtil.exe utility, the import process fails.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919598

Problems with duplicate alerts after you choose to “Suppress duplicate alerts”.  This one has a hotfix that you need to obtain from Microsoft Support.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918176

Problems with Dell Updates and SMS 2003.  When you select Automatically download the components from the web in the Setup Wizard for Microsoft SMS 2003 Inventory Tool for Dell Update, you receive the following error message:

The Sync task failed to download content from source location. (Error code: 0x80040100)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919591

WELCOME!

My name is Britten Martin.  I am team manager within Microsoft's Product Support Services.  I work within the Manageability specialty in Enterprise Product Support.  In Manageability, we support Systems Management Server (SMS), Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), and all of the feature pack and management pack add-ons.

Within Manageability support, we hold regular "Red Zone" meetings which discuss top customer issues, emerging issues, new products, new content, and new bugs.  The goal of these calls is to get our support engineers up-to-speed on the issues and also review the data to pass to the Product Teams for changes in the current and future versions of our products.

This blog will share our top issues along with how a user would go about fixing the issues.  We will also share links to new content, information on upcoming products, and other information that may be useful when working with SMS and MOM.

We welcome your feedback!