sccmsccm-2012sccm-2012-r2
SCCM administrators set maintenance windows for devices. Users set business hours for the same devices. It seems inevitable that maintenance windows and business hours will overlap. During that overlap, will SCCM perform the operations that support maintenance windows?
This technet blog post is the best resource I have found for understanding maintenance windows and business hours. It is, however, silent on the matter of overlap between the two.
Perhaps the
REVsite code was used for a temporary test installation of SCCM 2012? Perhaps not. Institutional knowledge doesn't have any record of theREVit and the migration we performed before I was hired.
This hunch was correct. I got a hold of my predecessor and apparently the first and unsuccessful attempt to migrate from SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2010 used the REV site code. How it managed to sit dormant in WMI all this time and why it got "activated" is a complete mystery to me.
I very carefully re-read the solution in this TechNet post which advised deleting the old namespaces and decided to try that. I kind of hesitate to mark this as an answer even though it did resolve this issue, it indicates that I implicitly approve of it, especially since I couldn't get anyone "official" at Microsoft to confirm whether or not this was a safe approach or what the consequences were for doing this. That being said, make sure you have complete backups of your SCCM server or at least a much more intimate knowledge of WMI before proceeding. You could very easily break everything doing this, especially if like me, you're not familiar with WMI and how deeply SCCM leverages it.
I used wbemtest to connect to the root\sms namespace on our SCCM server. From there I used the [Enum_Instances...] button and search for __NAMESPACE as the superclass. I deleted the entry for the REV site code. I then did the same Enum_Instances for the SMS_ProviderLocation as the superclass and deleted the old site code from that namespace. Re-running the Automatic Deployment Rules and reviewing the PatchDownloader.log showed the successful downloading of each Windows Update.
I would greatly appreciate more information about how these namespaces are used by SCCM and exactly how this fixed the issue if anyone has more detailed information.
Strangest fix i can think of... but i found this article and tried out one of the fixes and it seemed to fix the issue
I wound up copying the smsperf.dll file from the syswow64 directory into the system32 directory and the clients started working. Seems unlikely to me but its working now so i will leave it alone! :) Thanks
Best Answer
From my understanding; (fairly new to SCCM 2012, been working with SCE 2010 for a while though) the elements in play here:
The Business Scenario
Let's say you are trying to deploy "Java 8 Update xx" to end user machines in a single device collection. Why? Because Java.
The two in question:
Business Hours: This is a rotating weekly calendar which the end user is allowed to configure. I.E. end-user Mary wants all software updates and installations to occur when she leaves the office at 5:00 PM on the days she works Monday through Friday.
She will go into the Software Center console and set her Business Hours like...
We will call this $BizWindow, it will evaluate to TRUE during the hours specified and FALSE when outside of the set time frame.
Maintenance Windows: This can be a Monthly, Weekly, or Daily schedule where the administrator is allowed to set a range of hours when an installation will be available to computers. These settings are configured at the Device Collection level.
We will call this $MaintWindow, it will evaluate to TRUE when it is 4:00 PM - 8:00 PM every single day.
Necessary Conditions:
So for the software to begin installing on the client device, the computer needs to meet two conditions:
1.) It is not in the Business Hours
2.) It is in the Maintenance Window
I.E.
So for the above example
Mary's computer will install Java during:
Honorable Mentions
When publishing Apps and Packages, there is a way to supersede any sort of Maintenance Window and Business Hours rules in the deployment settings. Then the software will become available/install immediately after it has been distributed to the respective DP's and the SCCM client updates the list.
Hope that helps.