NS Agent-Symantec Management Agent UI hanging

Owned by Anonymous
Last updated: Dec 15, 2015 by Mike Murphy

Issue

ACS is installed and the NS Agent/Symantec Management UI won't display.

Resolution

Try both options if uncertain as to the cause or the exact type of interferece being observed.

Update and Final Resolution for SMP 7.0 environments

The following registry setting can be changed to alter this behaviour.

Key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Plugin Objects\Agent\Resource Discovery Task Agent
Name: Always Load
Value: 0

The 7.0 releases sets this value to 1 which may cause the Altiris Agent to continue to attempt to load the Task Agent as a Policy agent. It appears we have inadvertently exposed an issue with an interim agent update.

We saw this issue on the NS7.1 agent and has been rectified in our 7.1 agent distributions.

Additional context: There are no resource discovery tasks being performed: just the NS Agent is attempting to load the Task Agent as an NS Agent.

There are two Resource Discovery components:
- Resource Discovery Agent (a 'typical' NS Agent that receives policies)
- Resource Discovery Task Agent (a NS Client Task Agent that is activated by the Client Task subsystem)

The 'Always Load' configuration setting has been present since the 6.x, and only came to our attention in the SMP 7.1 series agent.

The information below is deprecated for SMP 7.0 environments which are resolved by the above information, but still applies for NS 6, SMP 7.1, and SMP 7.0 if the above information does not resolve the issue

Option 1

ACS may be affecting the NS agent/Symantec Management UI if the processes involved in displaying the NS agent/Symantec Management UI have been mistakenly included in a policy which denies or reduces the rights of the running process.

Methods to diagnose:

  • Increase the NS agent/Symantec Management logging level and search the logs (both NS and ACS) for the processes (usually AeXAgentActivate.exe or AeXAgentUIHost.exe or AeXAgentDesktop.exe) having a policy applied to them.
     
  • Check all filters and File Parameter Collections to make sure the processes noted above (or any NS agent process) are not included in an ACS policy which would deny the process running or affect the rights of the process or any other action other than "No Action".

Option 2

  • Try restarting the Altiris agent service when the ACS service is running. If the Altiris agent restarts OK and the sys tray icon shows (if it is set to display in the agent configuration or through the installation options) then the interaction with the ACS service and plug-in agent should not be a problem.
  • If there is a problem on the restart or it still seems there is some issue, check if there are active ACS policies (applied to the agent having the issue) which have message actions as part of the an ACS policies application actions. Message actions (actions which display the message bubbles from the Altiris agent sys tray icon) are the only interaction between the Altiris agent and the ACS plug-in agent which is not common to any other plug-in agent. If there are policies applied to the agent in question which have message actions either disable those policies or change their actions to no include the message actions and see if the agent still has the issues.