Altiris Likes Index Memory
Came across an interesting problem in Altiris while working with Patch Management, and seems it is one of those undocumented tidbits.
I basically found myself in the situation where, post-install/repair, Patch Management wasn’t detecting that Patch Management for Windows Report Pack was installed when the application indicated that it was. This is a fairly common error, and anybody who has had to uninstall/reinstall PM via the Solution Center has probably had to deal with it at some point.
Patch Management Core has detected that the following component is not installed: Patch Management for Windows Report Pack This component is required by the page you tried to view and must be installed before you can continue.
But what made this (un)fun was that the standard solution to this problem - repair the NS install and then the SP - didn’t work. In fact, none of the solutions in the KB worked.
Now my stupid moment was in not checking the log file sooner; I assumed it was the standard problem that I had worked with before. However, I was wrong. There were two key items in the log file:
[CDATA[Transaction being rolled back automatically during dispose. To disable this warning rollback your transaction explicitly! Dispose location:
and
[CDATA[Failed to install product. [This index operation requires 2048 KB of memory per DOP. The total requirement of 8192 KB for DOP of 4 is greater than the sp_configure value of 1024 KB set for the advanced server configuration option "index create memory (KB)". Increase this setting or reduce DOP and rerun the query.
The statement has been terminated.] ( Unhandled exception. Type=System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException Msg=This index operation requires 2048 KB of memory per DOP. The total requirement of 8192 KB for DOP of 4 is greater than the sp_configure value of 1024 KB set for the advanced server configuration option “index create memory (KB)”. Increase this setting or reduce DOP and rerun the query. The statement has been terminated.
The net effect of this is that the option is not actually installed by the Solution Center, even though the application indicates that it is installed.
Fortunately the solution was easy: In SQL 2005, modify the server properties so that Index Memory Size is configured to use dynamic values. I rebooted the Altiris server as a precaution, then tried things again. And it worked!