ConfigMgr client constantly reinstalling every 5 hours

I first had this happen on just one of my servers. It was annoying and was causing massive numbers of WMI entries in the event logs each time it happened. I tried to just stop and disable the ConfigMgr client, but it would be “reactivated” again by something. Recently at a client site I found it happening an a large number… so time to investigate.

I checked there were no push jobs running, but there was *something* causing it to repeat. Some digging later and I finally found the reason.

There is a scheduled task created by CCMSETUP to retry if it isn’t able to install correctly on the first attempt. Under some circumstances, this task isn’t cleaned up and so the reinstall keeps happening

Configuration Manager Power Policies not applying

Sigh. Turns out this is one of those “obvious” facepalm issues. Posting the issue anyway in the event other people come across it.

Windows clients on Configuration Manager 2012 R2 are not applying power policies at all. Standard Windows power settings still applied and available.

•  Client policy enabled for applying power settings
• Collection has a power policy configured (either pre-existing or custom)
• No Group Policies configured to apply any sort of power settings
• Client in collection
• PolicyEvaluator.log and PolicyAgent.log both indicate the policy has been applied by the client
  • Policy appears with the CollectionID as a reference
• No power configuration change occur on the target workstation
• Lots of activity in pwrmgmt.log, but nothing seem specific to the policy I have configured, and no errors
• PwrProvider.log just repeats message: “Failed to read ValueUnitsSpecifier” and nothing else
• No Windows Event Viewer messages stand-out as related to this issue

Configuration Manager Client fails to assign to site

Installing Configuration Manager 2012 clients on all my servers was fairly easy and straight forward. With one exception – My TMG2010 server running Server 2008R2.
For some reason, the client would install, but would never assign itself to my site, or download policies. The firewall rules allowed it to talk to the ConfigMgr server, and monitoring the traffic showed nothing was being blocked at all.
Much digging in TechNet etc and I found various mentions relating to certificates. This put me on the right track and got me 80% of the way there, but not quite.

There was not a lot of indication of what was going wrong. Most of the logs just weren’t reporting anything, let alone an error. The one log that was showing something is the “ClientIDManagerStartuplog” with repeating entries of

RegTask: Failed to get certificate. Error: 0x80004005

This was the only place I could find an indication of what was wrong.

Various articles say to delete all the files in the MachineKeys certificates folder. That is VERY BAD, DO NOT DO THAT!

While they are misguided, they do point to the correct resolution. Some suggest deleting one specific file which is the SMS certificate. At first, permissions blocked me doing this, but even after deleting it, the problem would repeat.

Configuration Manager 2012 Client command line options

Just a quick reference as I always seem to have trouble locating the technet article with the full command line install options for the Configuration Manager ccmsetup.exe

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg699356.aspx