ITMU v2 No Longer Works

April 06, 2007

Late last year a flood of calls came into Microsoft Premier Support Services (PSS) regarding the SMS patch scan causing computers to lock up or freeze for a long period of time while the patches were installed. This problem got immediate attention by the product teams and a new version of ITMU was released to help resolve the issues being reported.

The issues actually lie in the WUA agent that is installed on each computer not really with SMS itself, the problem was also complicated by the Wsusscan.cab file reaching its size limit.

Microsoft published KB 926464 to help make customers aware of the problem and to provide an new version of the offline scan file now called Wsusscn2.cab. As of March 27th the

When v3 first came out (download here) it was to address these issues. Since then most, around 90%, of customers have seen the CPU usage during the patching process drop to about 50% and also running as a lower priority thread so it does not appear to lock up the computer. But some customers still report the old behavior, which was also because the system would actually rescan after each patch install instead of just pre and post scan.

One of the drawbacks of the new version of ITMU is that the SMS db size gets much larger, as Steve Thompson put it,” they designed the new ITMU db wrong, they put everything into one table.” Personally, I think the SMS db could have been designed better to begin with. So customers should also make sure that they are running maintenance on their SMS db’s or it could start to impact performance or worse.

Here are some indications that you need to upgrade.

Customers that have not yet upgraded their installations of ITMU to ITMUv3 and have the default configuration of syncing the catalog from Microsoft.com (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=40751) will notice that the advertisements for the "Microsoft Updates Tool Sync" will fail and produce an SMS Status Message 1007.
Additionally the WSUSSyncXML.log will contain the following line:
UpdateWUSCatalog(): error 0x80004005, Extended properties fragment not found for update 466726, returned from ExpandNode
The above error is further indication that the customer should upgrade to ITMUv3 in order to continue to be able to sync an updated catalog.

If you have not upgraded to ITMU v3 you should do so immediately!

Regards,

Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Senior Technical Consultant | Microsoft Practices | Dimension Data

Tags: ITMU SMS Microsoft WSUS Security Patch Scan

Filed under: SMS 2003, KB Articles, Patching

Comments

# On Tuesday, April 24, 2007 10:31 AM wallacee said:

I have a few minor problems. My site seems to be exhibiting behavior I would expect if the ITMU tool had not been updated - I'm getting a failure of the update sync package, and an error message in the logs that mentions a file format problem with wsusscan.cab, which I believe is no longer even the correct file name.

However, I can't even *find* the WSUSSyncXML.log file you mention in order to check if I'm getting the same error you cite.

Also, the download link you included in your article takes me to a page at microsoft that does not include any way to actually download ITMU v3. Of course, every other link I can find, including searching MS Support pages, is doing the same thing. Is MS hiding SMS ITMU v3 for some reason?

All of this was supposedly done before Christmas, by the consultant guru, but now we seem to be having errors that indicate it either didn;t get done, or something wnet wrong. Unfortunately, the tools that *might* fix it - like an ITMU update - appear to have vanished just when I need them.

This is an SMS SP2 site, running on Win2K3SP1 servers

- Everett
# On Tuesday, April 24, 2007 11:25 AM aclendenen said:

Here is the link to download the latest version of ITMU (v3).

www.microsoft.com/.../msupdates.mspx

The button on the side will kick off the download.

I would also suggest you look in the VPCache to see which CAB file your client is trying to use.

Regards,

Anthony
# On Tuesday, April 24, 2007 11:27 AM wallacee said:

Ignore most of the previous comment. Once I finally found the actual download link - my browser was obscuring the little "go" button on the right side of the page for no discernable reason - I was able to update to ITMU v3 and it appears to be working again.

- Everett