What's that TMP file doing filling up my free space?
Posted
Thursday, April 09, 2009 7:38 AM
by
bwilms
In our environment, we have roles separated out. The software packaging team handles preparation of the application and packaging in SMS. The Systems Management Team handles everything else.
A new packaging team member was learning the ropes of SMS packaging and gave me a call.
"Brett, the package isn't available for me to deploy yet. I copied it to the Distribution Point, but it hasn't shown up yet. Can you have a look?"
Meanwhile, I get a call from our storage team.
"Brett, you seem to have a very large file growing continually larger on your D drive. You might want to take a look."
He was right. There was a TMP file growing at about 270MB per minute on my D drive. I saw the free space drop in chunks. I didn't know what to do. Before I knew it, free space was gone and then - poof - the file had disappeared and all my space was returned to me. That was about the best possible scenario I could have imagined (the one I was expecting was much worse).
I performed a Windows search in the SMS\logs directory, looking for files containing the phrase "TMP". One file was returned - distmgr.log. Could the package distribution issue and the monster TMP file somehow be related? Then I saw this in the log:
Starting to compress \\CENTRALSITESERVER\PKG_SRC to D:\_S Ms9ie.TMP for package ABC000E4
...
Cannot write to output file, Win32 Error = 112
CTool::CompressAndAppendFile failed, error = 4, win32 = 112, filename = (null)
Cannot compress \\CENTRALSITESERVER\PKG_SRC to D:\_S Mroa3.TMP, last failed file is , Win32 error = 112
STATMSG: ID=2309 SEV=E LEV=M SOURCE="SMS Server" COMP="SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER" SYS=CENTRALSITESERVER SITE=ABC PID=1940 TID=9476 GMTDATE=Tue Mar 24 21:30:35.329 2009 ISTR0="ABC000E4" ISTR1="\\CENTRALSITESERVER\PKG_SRC" ISTR2="" ISTR3="D:\_S Mroa3.TMP" ISTR4="" ISTR5="" ISTR6="" ISTR7="" ISTR8="" ISTR9="" NUMATTRS=1 AID0=400 AVAL0="ABC000E4"
Cannot create the compressed copy for package ABC000E4.
StoredPkgVersion (0) of package ABC000E4. StoredPkgVersion in database is 0.
SourceVersion (1) of package ABC000E4. SourceVersion in database is 1.
STATMSG: ID=2302 SEV=E LEV=M SOURCE="SMS Server" COMP="SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER" SYS=CENTRALSITESERVER SITE=ABC PID=1940 TID=9476 GMTDATE=Tue Mar 24 21:30:35.344 2009 ISTR0="PACKAGER - PI 2008" ISTR1="ABC000E4" ISTR2="" ISTR3="" ISTR4="" ISTR5="" ISTR6="" ISTR7="" ISTR8="" ISTR9="" NUMATTRS=1 AID0=400 AVAL0="ABC000E4"
Failed to process package ABC000E4 after 28 retries, will retry 72 more times
Exiting package processing thread.
Used 0 out of 3 allowed processing threads.
It turned out that the packge created by the new team member was pointing to the root of our package repository, instead of the subdirectory. SMS tried to compress the data for the "package" (which in this case was the source files for ALL packages) but due to space limitations, it choked and said "I quit".
I went into the package, corrected the source directory, resent it to the distribution point and everything was happy. Lesson learned - a little more supervision and direction may be necessary for first time packagers.