- Adeel Mohd | Configuration Manager Support Engineer
I recently came across an interesting issue that I had never witnessed before in System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (ConfigMgr 2007) and while troubleshooting I learned it had to do with one of the new features included in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr 2012). If you’re new to ConfigMgr 2012 then you might take a minute to read through this one and learn how this new feature may affect client reboots in your software deployments.
Consider this scenario:
You deploy Software Updates or any type of deployment to a specific collection that has a maintenance window configured. The deployments succeed, however the client machines do not reboot inside or outside of their maintenance window even though a reboot is required per the deployment. In such a case, the only option left is to reboot the machines manually which can be very painful in a large environment.
When analyzing Rebootcoordinator.log we saw the following entries:
ServiceWindowsManager has allowed us to Reboot– means the Maintenance window has permitted to reboot
System restart turnaround time is 36600 seconds - means the total time of maintenance windows on the client is 610 minutes
Scheduled reboot from agent UpdatesDeploymentAgent - means updates were deployed and a reboot is required
Then straight after that the log shows the following entries:
ServiceWindowsManager has not allowed us to Reboot
ServiceWindowsManager says that we will not be able to Reboot in the future
We may not Reboot ever. Sending 'System May Never Reboot' Status Message
When we checked the Computer Restart client setting under the Administration node in the console (New in ConfigMgr 2012) we found that the total time of all applicable maintenance windows was 610 minutes and the time configured for the restart temporary notification interval and for the final countdown interval was also 610 minutes. This was our problem.
As a rule, the value for the restart temporary notification interval and the value for the final countdown interval should be shorter in duration than the shortest maintenance window that is applied to the client computer. In our case the shortest maintenance window was configured for 30 minutes.
To resolve this, we opened the console and went to Administration –> Client settings –> properties-> Computer restart settings and changed the value for temporary notification interval and for final countdown interval to 15 minutes. This was less than the shortest maintenance window of 30 minutes and it fixed our issue. So if you have a deployment that’s not triggering a reboot when you think it should, make sure your temporary notification interval and final countdown interval is less than the shortest maintenance window for the targeted client. Chances are this will fix your issue.
Adeel Mohd | Support Engineer
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