We had a problem with one of our SMS servers today, it was not processing DDR records.

All 19,000+ of them.

After some investigation, a co-worker found it was a corrupted DDR record which caused SMS to get stuck. 

After we fixed it, SMS started processing them records at 1 DDR per seconds.
Let’s do the math, 19,000 records at 1 per second, is 60 DDR per minute; and 3600 per hour.  It would take at 5 hours to process all those.
PLUS SMS was adding more DDR records, all the time.

Oh Bother it

Remembering that SMS Primary Sites run SQL Server, I wondered … … did we exclude the SQL Process from our AV program???

In short, no.  Excluding SQLSERVR.EXE made a tiny difference.  Adding SMSEXEC.EXE & CCMEXEC.EXE to the exclusion list made a HUGH difference.

We went from 1 record per second, to 5 records per second being processed.

We’re deploying the change to the rest of the SMS Server fleet, Tuesday.

SMS 2003 produces this error when you have decided to create a new Operating System Package.

The frustrating thing is that it may work on one PC, and not another.

The underlying cause?

Difference versions of OS Deployment Feature Pack were installed.  Version 2.50.3658.1102 caused the error I was having.

The fix to the "… invalid format." error, was to update to version 2.50.3726.2000.

Computer Associates used to recommend excluding particular processes and directories from eTrust anti-virus scanning.  This, I found, was very important with Microsoft SQL Server, as it would cause a significant performance hit.

You would do this via setting the following registry keys, under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ComputerAssociates\eTrustITM\CurrentVersion\Realtime

szExcludeProcessNames

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