Today one of our software packagers had an issue. One of his packages was not having it's distribution point updated correctly. The error in the Altiris Logs was as follows,
Unexpected exception occurred when running Manage Distribution Points for package 26ff6c0c-88d5-4b15-a462-a25804bfaa4e
Access to path '\\mypackageserver\JobSource\Apps\DWG_Trueview_2014\19.1.18.0\Program Files\DWG TrueView 2014\Support\africa.map' has been denied.
At first, I thought it was a path issue. But, the path length was fine. We even tried moving the .map file around, and the error just followed it.
At first, we thought it was a client issue -the packager's machine. The .map file on his machine had the type ISWI.MAP (Install Shield Windows Installer MAP file) which was unusual for us, so I checked if anything was keeping the .map file open using Mark Russinovich's Handle, but nothing.
All very odd. Got him to close down his machines to pay him back for annoying me with this puzzle, and nothing.
Next I tried creating a new UNC package, just containing the one dummy file ian.map to see what would happen.. And the error appeared for this package too...
Unexpected exception occurred when running Manage Distribution Points for package 4af182ed-fab9-42a1-bcd0-6c4b29f8ee38
Access to path '\\mypackageservers\Jobsource\Apps\_Ian_test\ian.map' has been denied.
So, at the moment... we are puzzled. Something is certainly getting in the way of these files whilst the distribution point update is in progress. To resolve we'll likely zip up these map files to workaround this. Major pain... unless anyone has any clues?