I have had to deal with two problem scenarios since August, where a member of our team wanted to advertise a McAfee VirusScan update to a site clients collection:
Scenario 1
They nested the domain all clients collection as a sub-collection of the McAfee clients collection, of which the majority were members of both.Both SMS and SQL threw a wobbly and SQL was creating some kind of looping query. Result was that the SMS exec service kept crashing. I investigated what was happening and had to go into the Collection_SubCollections table in SQL and remove the link between the two collections.
IMPACT = Simple misunderstanding of Collection Hierarchy caused significant disruption to the functionality of all the SMS sites
Scenario 2
Happened last week, again another member of the team, created a McAfee upgrade collection on the Central site and placed the collection for our small sites as a subcollection of it (all on the Central site). Both the top level McAfee and Small sites collection do not have any Membership rules. It is only the subcollections underneath them that have the membership rules. That happened Thursday of last week, on friday I noticed that none of the small site clients had the advertisements available that were advertised to the Small sites collection. They only had advertisements that were advertised directly to their particular site collection.
Again I cannot prove it at the moment, but I figured I had a similar problem to Scenario 1.This time there was no impact on SQL. I removed the Small site client collection from underneath the McAfee one and deleted the McAfee collection. I rescheduled (and later readvertised all the advertisements) to the Small site client collection.
Strangely they did not appear immediately, however two of the other Primary sites in our hierarchy had the SMSExec hanging (this is pre-SP3 fix that we are deploying imminenetly). Once I started these sites off again, the advertiements began to appear almost immediately.
My questions are:
Is there a Best practice on nesting collections ?
Is there a decisive "No-No" that you should not do when nesting collections ?
Does emuneration and refresh of all Central site collections on Primary child sites have an effect on subsequent actions (such as readvertising) ?
Is it feasible to suggest that having a subcollection with no membership rules could cause a problem with the availablity of packages ?
How does SMS handle collection membership and advertisement availability ?
Essential thing is that I have fixed it, but would like to document the best practice for the sake of the rest of the team (and subsequent new staff)There is loads here, so I don't expect anyone will have all the answers, but any ideas to throw into the melting pot would be appreciated ?
Dermot
Scenario 1
They nested the domain all clients collection as a sub-collection of the McAfee clients collection, of which the majority were members of both.Both SMS and SQL threw a wobbly and SQL was creating some kind of looping query. Result was that the SMS exec service kept crashing. I investigated what was happening and had to go into the Collection_SubCollections table in SQL and remove the link between the two collections.
IMPACT = Simple misunderstanding of Collection Hierarchy caused significant disruption to the functionality of all the SMS sites
Scenario 2
Happened last week, again another member of the team, created a McAfee upgrade collection on the Central site and placed the collection for our small sites as a subcollection of it (all on the Central site). Both the top level McAfee and Small sites collection do not have any Membership rules. It is only the subcollections underneath them that have the membership rules. That happened Thursday of last week, on friday I noticed that none of the small site clients had the advertisements available that were advertised to the Small sites collection. They only had advertisements that were advertised directly to their particular site collection.
Again I cannot prove it at the moment, but I figured I had a similar problem to Scenario 1.This time there was no impact on SQL. I removed the Small site client collection from underneath the McAfee one and deleted the McAfee collection. I rescheduled (and later readvertised all the advertisements) to the Small site client collection.
Strangely they did not appear immediately, however two of the other Primary sites in our hierarchy had the SMSExec hanging (this is pre-SP3 fix that we are deploying imminenetly). Once I started these sites off again, the advertiements began to appear almost immediately.
My questions are:
Is there a Best practice on nesting collections ?
Is there a decisive "No-No" that you should not do when nesting collections ?
Does emuneration and refresh of all Central site collections on Primary child sites have an effect on subsequent actions (such as readvertising) ?
Is it feasible to suggest that having a subcollection with no membership rules could cause a problem with the availablity of packages ?
How does SMS handle collection membership and advertisement availability ?
Essential thing is that I have fixed it, but would like to document the best practice for the sake of the rest of the team (and subsequent new staff)There is loads here, so I don't expect anyone will have all the answers, but any ideas to throw into the melting pot would be appreciated ?
Dermot