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sms: advertising packages based on status message

i have no idea what to call this particular post. i mean, it's the day before the 4th of july... so i could call it something like... making fireworks with sms? i don't know.

the whole thing started off when i was down visiting with a site system. they pointed out that some of their clients were failing to patch. further examination revealed that these clients looked healthy. wiping vpcache, reinstalling the client, etc... just wasn't doing it.

examining this scan process showed that smswushandler.log was where the real problems were stemming from. anyway, i found that some of their failures had a common execution status of 11412. the unfortunate part of this error message is that it can mean different types of scan failures including down-level or broken windows update agents. in my case, i wanted to break it up into two distinct things so that i could correct both client problems. the reason for doing is because 11412 isn't distinct enough to handle it with one method of remediation.

i used the idea of health collections to build this scenario. i had some leftover collection structure from an original one that i got from chris sugdinis. building the passing collections for windows update agent made it easy to pick out the broken windows update agents. of any that passed the version criteria, i used collection limits to bring those into the new collection, where i used the sms_clientadvertisementstatus class to pull back the 11412 error messages. (this method of creating queries is noted by eric holtz and greg ramsey.) here's the criteria i used:

 

select sys.ResourceID,sys.ResourceType,sys.Name,sys.SMSUniqueIdentifier, sys.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup,sys.Client from sms_r_system as sys inner join SMS_ClientAdvertisementStatus as cas on sys.ResourceID=cas.ResourceID WHERE cas.AdvertisementID in ('xyz00001','xyz00002','xyz00003') and cas.lastexecutionresult=11412 and cas.laststate=11

 

the value in the parenthesis are the advertisement ids in my environment. now what to do with this new collection? target them for repair. here's a batch command you can use to do just this.

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