Thursday, April 17, 2008

SCCM - Software inventory failing on XP clients: ~0000.exe

For those who have been around the SMS block, there are any number of reasons why a software inventory can fail. DNS, firewall rules, Management Point issues etc. All of these reasons have been well documented on MyITforum.com, as well as numerous other SMS/SCCM resources. This was a new one.

Issue:

The current client that I'm working with was seeing that the Software inventory had never run on approximately 50% of their environment since SCCM was deployed to all servers and desktops last fall. (This problem was identified by running the 'Inventory dates for a specific computer' report, and seeing a blank value for half of the workstations in the list.) Digging further in revealed that the issue was workstation-specific as all servers were running inventory as scheduled.

The log files were showing that the MIF's were making it to the management point, however the processing of the MIF's was failing. As a result the 'badsinv' inbox had thousands of .sid's and .sic's.

Resolution

The culprit for this problem is Symantec Ghost. When imaging a workstation, certain version of ghost drop a temporary file that is not removed: ~0000.exe This file is located here:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Ghost\AutoInstall\Installed Applications\~0000.exe

This file is dated with the year 1601. Apparently the Microsoft SCCM developers forgot to account for the all-to-common scenario of handling files that were created during the colonization of America.

Once this file was either removed or skipped and a full software inventory was run, the issue was resolved (see my post prior to this for a script to run that scan).

Important note on skipping directorys in your inventory scans: Most are probably aware that 'Skpswi.dat' can be created used to exclude directorys and subdirectories from software inventory. A not so widely known fact is that software inventory will only exclude the directory if Skpswi.dat is hidden.

So when you create your blank text file & rename it to Skpswi.dat, make sure you check the box to make it hidden before deploying.





4 comments:

Inventory Management Software said...

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Inventory POS System said...

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Lewis said...

That's a good tip about it needing to be hidden!

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