M100765: RayManageSoft Policy Tracing Package

This article provides a package that can be deployed to managed devices to turn on policy tracing. This is useful in resolving Active Directory reliability issues within an organisation when managed devices or users may not be getting policy or their respective packages as expected.

The attached package can be deployed to managed devices to enable tracing of the RayManageSoft policy client sub-system.

Tracing of the sub-system may be necessary if:

• Computers or users are not able to get group policy
• Computers or users are installing packages that have not been assigned to them, even though security group membership looks correct
• Troubleshooting is needed for Active Directory issues that could not be resolved using the standard policy log file for RayManageSoft for Managed Devices.

This type of problem is typically intermittent and generally requires that a large number of machines have policy tracing turned on to identify the cause of the problem. This scaling makes a package such as the attached a convenient way to turn on (and off) tracing on many managed devices at once.

Use

To use this package, perform the following steps:

1. Receive the package and its source into your software library.
2. Distribute the package to appropriate distribution servers.
3. Create a policy that is linked to the relevant Organisational Unit (typically a site) where computers or users are experiencing an issue.
4. Ensure that the package is configured to uninstall when removed from policy.
5. Ensure that the group policy is Applied for Authenticated Users.
6. Add the package into policy without security group filtering.

This package will create a file called mgspolicy.log under the Program Files\ManageSoft\DevLogs directory.

Once the issue has been reproduced, this log file should be zipped up and sent to ManageSoft Support for review.

The package may then be removed from policy. This will turn off tracing for the policy client and (after a machine reboot) remove the mgspolicy.log file.

Notes

Warning: While tracing is turned on by this package, trace files will grow indefinitely, and will ultimately fill up the disk. This tracing should not be turned on for any longer than necessary. Please ensure that this package is removed from policy when the investigation is complete.

Warning: This package should not be installed on any machine with Administration server components installed.

Package customisation: To customise the location of the mgspolicy.log, make the following updates:

1. The etap.trace file contains a filename field. This will need to be updated to point to the location where mgspolicy.logwill be written.
2. The package Install Location should be updated to reflect the new location where mgspolicy.log will be written.