System Management

Today I learned again a lesson I knew for some time but was hoping that I can forget it. The lesson was about: “Trust anyone. Test for yourself.”

Having to install WSUS on a remote SQL 2005 that had WSUS database installed before, I asked one SQL guy if renaming the old WSUS database is enough to install a new WSUS one. He said yes. Ok then, I started installing WSUS.

Needless to say, installation failed:

There is a problem with the windows installer package.A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected.Contact your support personnel or package

Two hours of troubleshooting permission and connection problems, made me read all WSUS installation log files located in “X:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp”. One of the file was 1 KB size so it does not contain much info. Anyway, the file content was:

Changed database context to 'master'.
Msg 1802, Level 16, State 4, Server SQL-SERVER-NAME,  Line 2
CREATE DATABASE failed. Some file names listed could not be created. Check related errors.Msg 5170, Level 16, State 1, Server SQL-SERVER-NAME,  Line 2
Cannot create file 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\DATA\SUSDB.mdf' because it already exists. Change the file path or the file name, and retry the operation.
Changed database context to 'master'.

I will not comment the 4^th line as it says pretty much all…

I guess when doing something, you have to test for yourself everything. Lesson learned. Again.

Few months  ago I had an interesting problem at a client site that took me a while to resolve. So I want to post it here, maybe it will help others…

After a successful upgrade from SMS 2003 to SCCM 2007 SP1, I configured software update point, synchronized with Microsoft update to get the list of updates for products I needed and created a new list with updates required by clients. When I tried to deploy software updates it should download the updates to my SCCM server. Well, this step failed. PatchDownloader.log reported the following:
Trying to connect to the root\SMS namespace on the XYZ-SCCM machine
Connected to \\XYZ-SCCM\root\SMS
Trying to connect to the \\XYZ-SCCM\root\sms\site_XYZ namespace on the machine
Connected to \\XYZ-SCCM\root\sms\site_XYZ
Download destination = \\XYZ-SCCM\WsusContent\08123a3c-c7fd-43a4-a4ce-80089b1267df.1\WindowsXP-KB938828-x86-ENU.exe
Contentsource = http://www.download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3-19990518/cabpool/windowsxp-kb938828-x86-enu_ba3f0cbe4ba5736d4254732e41fe058697b76ebc.exe
Downloading content for ContentID = 8170, FileName = WindowsXP-KB938828-x86-ENU.exe
Try username DOMAIN\USERNAME from the registry
Proxy enabled proxy server ISAserver:8080
HttpSendRequest failed 12007
Download http://www.download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3-19990518/cabpool/windowsxp-kb938828-x86-enu_ba3f0cbe4ba5736d4254732e41fe058697b76ebc.exe to C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1.LAB\LOCALS~1\Temp\2\CAB3B.tmp returns 12007
ERROR: DownloadContentFiles() failed with hr=0x80072ee7


First I thought it was a stupid error, as I set (and checked twice) all correct information. Looks like proxy information was old and not updating with what I have set later in SCCM. So I needed to remove old information and set the new ones again.

I have checked the registry and I couldn’t do much as username and password was encrypted. Well, I used upddwnldcfg.exe (from <ConfigMgrInstallationFolder>\bin\i386\00000409 folder on a x86 machine) to delete all proxy information stored in the registry and added the new username, password and server’s IP address. After this, downloading updates worked perfectly. More information about configuring proxy settings using upddwnldcfg.exe, you can find here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb892795.aspx