Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Digging old knowledge out of the head

Stupid me!

I used to end my emails with this quote -

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.

-- Archibald McLeish (1892–1982), American poet

I just learned it the painful way. I had the experience, but it was burried too deep.

I was happily deploying software to our servers with SMS. I normally just push things out, but this time I wanted to install the program manually the first couple of times as it was Windows Server 2003 SP2. Well, I jumped in Add/Remove Programs, clicked Add New Programs and - nothing!

Strange!

I gave policyspy a go. Everything looked fine. I checked eventlog, status messages in SMS etc. Everything looked fine.

But on a few of my servers I could in fact see the expected advertisements.

Then I (finally) realized: If you connect to a computer with Remote Desktop and not to the console of that computer, SMS has a nasty bug and is not able to show advertisements in ARP or interact with the desktop.

Stupid bug. And stupid me for forgetting it.

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