Troubleshooting a failed Client Push Install
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Several students have requested assistance with their Client Push Installation. So, I thought it would be helpful to provide a guide to several of the common problems associated with client push.
We will cover the following:
- The lab prerequisites
- Initiating a client installation
- Checking out the Server and Client Logs
- Analyze errors that we find
- Examine the client push requirements
- Fixing the problems
- Take a look at the inbox and the retry folder
- Retry the installation
Lab Prerequisites
- Create an additional Windows 10 Computer in VirtualBox, (or your VM of choice) use your ISO file to create this VM.
- For Virtual Box, change the network to NAT network
- Assign the VM an available IP address.
- Name the VM ITFWS05
- Join ITFWS05 to the domain
Initiate a Client Installation
- From the Workspace click Assets and Compliance, From the Navigation pane, click Devices. After several minutes, ITFWS05 should appear in the console. Click ITFWS05, and also notice that the client has not been installed. Open the needed log files in CMTrace. CMTrace is located on
\\itfsccm01\sms_itf\tools\cmtrace.exe, right click on CMTrace and pin to the taskbar on your server.
Server logs
SMSprov.log, SmsAdminUI.log, are Site Server logs that record information about the operation of the Configuration Manager console.
The CCM.log, records client push activities on the Site Server.
- Open CMTrace, click the folder, click ignore existing lines, double click smsprov.log
- Open another instance of CMTrace, click the folder, click ignore existing lines, double click ccm.log
- Right-click on ITFWS05 click install client, click next, click the box that says install the client software from a specified site. In this case, our site is ITF-ITFLEE, click next, click next again, then close.
- Now open SMSprov.log, and we see it is checking to see if the user has rights. The log shows that the machine was able to initiate the install.
- Now let’s check the CCM.log in CMTrace. CCM.log will handle the installation requests. Notice there are errors.
Analyzing the errors
Now let’s analyze the errors – Now let’s take a look at our ccm.log file
- Notice that the process is trying each entry in the SMS Client Remote Installation accounts list. But continues to warn us that no remote client installation account was found.
Let’s take a look and see if there is a client installation account.
From the Configuration Manager console open the Workspace, click Administration, from the Navigation Pane click site configuration, click sites, click Client Installation Settings, select Client push installation. Click accounts, and here we see that there is no account listed. This is a problem that we will fix in a minute. This leads us to the next error.
- The process is trying and fails to connect to the admin$ using the machine account with an error 5.
Open CMTrace, from tools, click error lookup, type 5 in the error code box, which is access is denied.
Then the error continues by saying failed to connect to the \\ITFWS05\admin$ share using the ‘Machine Account’
This should raise several questions.
- Where did the admin$ share come from? These shares are automatically created by Windows.
- Why is there a $ after the word admin? The $ tells windows to hide the share • Where is the admin$ share located? It is located on C:\Windows
- What is it used for? It is used to deploy software remotely.
- What permissions do I need to access admin$ share? You need to have local administrator rights on the target computer.
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