Adding control to target drive failover functionality in Package Server
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Adding control to target drive failover functionality in Package Server

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Article ID: 184153

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Updated On:

Products

IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

With the release of ITMS 7.6, new functionality was added that should allow Package Servers to choose any other available drive rather than the system drive when the drive selected originally for package download gets full.

As an example, when using a secondary drive to house the agent and downloaded files and that fills up, the package services enumerate to the first logical device and uses that for package storage. In the case of the Package Servers, this would default to the system drive. 

Can the failover be turned off or redirect to another drive?

Resolution

The following was added as new settings under CoreSettings.config (under c:\ProgramData\Symantec\SMP\Settings):

<customSetting key="PkgSvrAllowAllFixedDrives" type="local" value="true" />
<customSetting key="PkgSvrExcludeSystemDrive" type="local" value="false" />

This is editable through the 'Package Service Settings' UI (under Settings>Notification Server>Site Server Settings>Package Service Settings in the 'Package Storage Settings' section) as seen here:

On the client side, two new registry values represent the PS policy settings mentioned above as seen here:

"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Package Server"
"AllowFixedDrives" REG_DWORD
"ExcludeSystemDrive" REG_DWORD

If "AllowFixedDrives" is greater than zero - then drive selection is allowed. Which means any other drive with enough space will be selected going in alphabetical order.
If "ExcludeSystemDrive" is greater than zero - then system drive will be skipped while drive selection cycle.

Those settings are populated with default values "1" and "0" accordingly and set by Package Server while policy processing. This means if they are changed by
hands, the values will be overwritten by next policy change.

Additional Information

"Configuring Primary File Storage Location for Package Servers Post-ITMS 8.0" ( KB 150359 )