Symantec Management Platform (Notification Server)

Once configured, the day to day operations and management of Task Server and its clients should be minimal. The bulk of your work is in scoping, installation and setup. However, there are some areas to be aware of, in terms of data growth and maintenance. Here are some tips to help you know where (and where not to) go.

Best Practices: Managing Task Servers

You should make sure that you have correctly configured Data purging for Task Servers to meet your reporting requirements. This is set by default to 30 days, and is set to run on the daily schedule by default as well. A best practice would be to change this to run on a custom schedule that runs daily, but not on the Daily shared schedule, as there are a substantial amount of other items that run on that schedule, and this could cause a substantial load on the Notification Server. See the figure below for the console location to change this.

Click to view.

The Task Data Purge Policy dialog.

Best Practices: Managing Task Server Agents

Once a Task Server is used by an agent, the agent will not attempt to use another Task Server until the agent has been restarted.

Task Server Common Problems and Troubleshooting

• If a task doesn't start immediately after running it, the most likely cause is that the tickle service on the NS is not running or not functioning properly, or that the client(s) haven't registered with the Task Server
  • Check the NS logs as well as diagnostic logs on the client(s) to determine if there is an error condition. Even if the tickle service is not working, tasks should still run within 10 minutes
• If you run a server task its output will not be visible, so avoid adding user interaction to server tasks
  • You should choose to save the script output (accessible from the "Advanced" button when editing a task) if you need to see it
• When sending a task to a server/client that is being viewed in Terminal Services, you may not see the task execute
  • The task will execute from the session that the Altiris client is in
• The Altiris Agent client-side functions of "Update Configuration" and "Send Basic Inventory" are not used to activate any Client Task Agent functions. While they may assist in testing agent connectivity, they DO NOT affect the use of the Client Task Agent.

Appendix A: Task Server Port Information

Task Server Ports

• TCP Port 50120 (Task Server Data Loader)
• TCP Port 50121 (Altiris HTTP Server connection to host )
• TCP Port 50122 (Altiris HTTP Server connection to host)
• TCP Port 50123 (Tickle Server)

Task Server Client Ports

• 50124 (To receive Tickle Packets)

Appendix B: Task Server Logging Information

• Task Servers installed on a Notification Server will use the a.log files
• Remote Task Servers use a log file named TASKMANAGMENT.log, found in C:\program files\altiris\client task management\logs\taskmanagement.log
• On a client machine, the agent.log files contain all Task Server-related logging information.

Appendix C: Installing Solution-Specific Sub-Agents

Software Delivery Agent For Task Server Installation

To install the Software Delivery Agent For Task Server,

1. Open the Notification Server Console and click Manage > Jobs. In the tree view, click Task Server Configuration> Software Delivery Agent For Task Server Installation
2. Select the collection Without Software Delivery Agent For Task Server Installed. Verify that the collection contains all computers that need the agent installed. By default, this collection includes the All Computers collection.
3. While still in the tree view, click the Software Delivery Agent For Task Server Rollout policy.
4. Enable the policy, and then click Apply. The next time the computers in the collection update their configuration, they will download and install the Power Management Task Agent package.

Other solution-specific agent installation instructions will be added as they become available.