Purpose
One of the most commonly used components of LANDESK Management Suite is the Software Distribution feature. Companies around the world use it to quickly and efficiently distribute software to hundreds, or even thousands of computers in a very short period. Some times however there are occasionally problems within a deployment task. This document will walk you through the basic steps of troubleshooting a Software Distribution task that has failed or is stuck in an active status. Also as working through the steps below you will find links to other troubleshooting documents that go into greater detail for specific issues.
Where to start?
Software Distribution has many moving parts so it is important to be able to quickly locate the failure point, and make sure to investigate the correct step in the process to resolve the issue. The following steps are commonly used by LANDESK Support to quickly locate the cause of a problem in Software Distribution.
- Did the clients try to run the task? If yes, how many clients are affected by this error?
- Is the problem on the Core or on the Client?
- If only a single client, the problem is likely on the client itself.
- If many clients are affected, the problem could be on the Core, Network Communication, or File Server.
- Did the task fail immediately after being started in the console, or did it run for a while before failure?
- Do the logs in the Diagnostics tool provide any extra information?
Once we know some basic information about the failure we can move to troubleshoot it efficiently.
Client Side Troubleshooting
According to the questions above, if you find that the problem is on the client itself please refer to the following documents to continue the troubleshooting process.
How to Troubleshoot Software Distribution Task - Client Side
How To Troubleshoot Policy Sync
Core Side Troubleshooting
If from the above questions you find that you need to troubleshoot an issue on the Core Server please continue to the following documents
How to Troubleshoot Software Distribution Task - Core Side
How to Troubleshoot Agent Discovery
Software Distribution Logging
There are a couple of verbose logging options that can help provide more information on Software Distribution tasks to help in finding and resolving the issue. Some of these logs are VERY verbose, and may take some time to read through.
In the LANDESK Management Suite almost all verbose logging is controlled by a feature we call XTrace. This provides simple method of enabling the verbose logging on both the Core and Client. The following document provides the instructions for
How to enable XTrace Diagnostic logging in LANDesk 9.6 Core and Clients
Log Locations:
Client Side
C:\ProgramData\LANDesk\Log:
ServiceHost.log - Communication from the core to the client.
PolicySync.exe.log - Downloading of Policies from the core server.
PolicySync.log - Monitors the performance of the PolicySync program itself.
SendTaskStatus.log - Monitors the task status updates sent from the client to the Core.
LocalSch.log - Monitors the activity of the Local Scheduler on the client.
tmcsvc.log - Monitors the performance of the LANDesk Targeted Multicast service on the client.
C:\Program Files (x86)\LANDesk\LDClient\Data:
sdclient.log - Monitors the performance of the sdclient process.
sdclient_task{taskID}.log - Displays the progress of a specific software distribution task on the client.
Core Side
C:\ProgramData\LANDesk\Log:
SchedSvc.log - Monitors performance of Scheduler Service.
LANDesk.Scheduler.GlobalScheduler.log - Monitors the task initialization process.
LANDesk.Scheduler.GlobalScheduler.Skeleton.log- Monitors the task initialization process.
raxfer.log - Monitors the WOL discovery and sending of the wake up packets.
\Program Files (x86)\LANDesk\ManagementSuite\Log:
TaskHandlerProxy.exe.log - Gathers the task information to hand-off to PolicyTaskHandler.exe
SchedQry.exe.log - Monitors the performance of resolving LDMS queries to add target to tasks.
SchedLDAPResolver.exe.log - Monitors the performance of resolving LDAP queries to add target to tasks.
PolicyTaskHandler.exe.log - Logs the discovery and deployment of tasks to the clients.
WSvulnerabilityCore.Dll.log - Monitors task status updates from clients while tasks are processed.
Other Information
If you did not find what you are looking for with this document please see the LANDESK Software Distribution Landing Page for more information.