Patch Management Solution

I am unable to receive any patches into our patch management console.  Recently we implemented a web security gateway and this was thought to be a problem, so I connected to an external connection that has no web page blocking and I receive an error stating the job to patch import has failed.  It runes for a couplpe minutes when I get this message.  I have gone over many of the articles available in the "self help" section but nothing that I have found seems to resolve the issue.  Does anyone have any ideas on this one?

Usually, if You are able to open pmimport.cab location from the Browser on the NS computer, Patch data import task should succeed. However, if You are sure that connectivity is not the issue root cause - could You please send us Server logs, during patch data import task execution. Thanks, Sergei

Also, please ensure that license not Yet expired, Patch Data Import could fail for that reason as well.

Sergei,

 

I just updated licensing a couple weeks ago and have confirmed we are good there, for at least a year, node numbers are good as well.  When I go to the pmi import webpage through a browser I can download the file but I get an error message that says it cannot open the cabinet file when clicking on it.  I am attaching a copy of the logs in an Excel file.  I got these from the log viewer after I filtered it out in the options section by "PMI".

BigDaddyPS, Regarding downloaded pmimport.cab: could You please check what size it is about, and if it is possible to open it via notepad, and what is written there. Original pmimport.cab usually has size about 1 MB, and consists of several packed xmls - usually it can be easily opened and extracted in windows explorer. So, it seems, that NS somehow receives bad pmimport.cab from solutionsam. Thanks, Sergei

BigDaddyPS - what web gateway are you using and what version of Altiris?  Did you ever resolve this?

We are using the McAfee webgateway with the 7.1 version of Altiris.  I connect our server up to the outside just to download the update patches for now.  Absolute nightmare trying to work with the DLP provider to get things straightened out.  Log after logs sent and no one can seem to figure it out.

Well, I have just run into an issue trying to roll out Altiris 7.1 and we just switched to a McAfee web gateway and it broke my 7.1 system's proxy authentication.  If you go to Settings; All Settings; Notification Server Settings; Proxy tab and click the proxy test on my system now is fails (we just used the same proxy name and redirected it to the McAfee with a DNS alias, so that made it all the more confusing).

When doing the proxy test we noticed it logging a 407 error in the Altiris log viewer, and then found a web page hit that may have a potential fix for the McAfee configuration (below).  But we have not tested it yet since we have to go through change control.

http://knowledgebase.solarwinds.com/kb/questions/3226/You+receive+error+407+when+using+McAfee+Web+Gateway.

I also have a 7.0 system running and it works fine with the McAfee gateway.  I believe this may be because the IIS version on Server 2003 uses .NET Framework 2, and the 7.1 system requires Server 2008 with IIS using .NET Framework 3.5 which is were the problem lies.

Hope that helps.  Let us know!

Definitely will take a look at this next week when I am back in the office.  Thanks for the tip!  I will report my findings back, here on this post.

Update:  We have now verified that the McAfee configuration change in the link above has resolved our proxy issue with Altiris 7.1 in our environment!

I think were good to go, but I will keep an eye on this over the next few times the task kicks off.  Good call!