During an upgrade, the following messages were noticed in the NS logs:

DAL errors started showing in logs for 
Altiris.NS.Replication.Hierarchy.Dal.dll and 
Altiris.NS.StandardItems.Dal.v4.2FF65FD64DC8089ED246FDDCD7A13815E0CD2FFE

Failed to install the product from the file: E:\Program Files\Altiris\Notification Server\Config\NS_Update.config

Critical error: Failed to compile shadow assembly.
error CS1548: Cryptographic failure while signing assembly 'c:\ProgramData\Symantec\SMP\DAL\Altiris.NS.StandardItems.Dal.v4.4A8824948D116B42ED54E95F9F927470F1C01E82\Altiris.NS.StandardItems.Dal.dll' -- 'Error signing assembly -- Unknown error (8013141c)'

Known issue

This issue has been reported to the Symantec Development team. Fixes about this process have been added to ITMS 8.0 and later.

Note:

In some rare cases, even with the mentioned fix mentioned here, you may need to verify the following:

Give your user (In our case, the «user» should be NS «App Identity») Full Access to the following folder: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys (or C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys in previous OS versions).

We found that in some occasions the permissions in the machine keys directory needed to have the service account (App Identity) added instead of just administrators group:

1. Change security on directory:
   • C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys
2. Add your App Identity account, with the following minimum "Advanced" set of permissions:

   • Create files / write data

   • Create folders / append data

   • Write attributes

   • Write extended attributes

   • Delete

3. After hitting apply, accept that 5 directories were "Access is denied", if any.