I have been trying to get patches downloaded and policies made for said patches. I go into the list of patches the system has found, say there's a security patch, pick anything, it does not matter at all, for Microsoft, Adobe, Google, whatever, pick one, right click, and choose distribute. It used to flag that patch for download, then the next day I could go in and tweak things - there would be a policy that was turned off, with the default settings as far as who and when. However, now it does nothing but say start pending - for minutes, hours, even days, until I kill it.
I found in the logs that a group of computers I had used once was messed up, so went to that policy that distributed several Microsoft updates and tried to remove that list of targets so I could DELETE it, and use the current better list of targets. I removed the target (list) from the policy, chose a new target and chose to save. It said saved, but sticks on start pending, since yesterday.
I have found several articles pointing to troubles downloading new patches, tasks getting stuck and never completing, etc. and ran reports and found MANY MANY failed tasks since at least December 8th. Holy cow, no wonder things have stopped working!
The issue is - after spending 3 hours here yesterday, forums (connect) blogs, KB articles and documents, nothing at all for this version - all dates back to 7.1 and PRIOR. All are from 2014 or earlier. I don't dare run SQL queries or changes against a database that's years advanced of those old articles.
Help, please! I've seen almost every single document published on task issues, start pending, etc. so please don't send me to the most common. I found a dozen or more messages or threads in Connect here and I followed every link people here suggested, as I said, most were OLD and for OLD versions. We are at 7.6, the VERY latest. I have all fixes and patches applied to the management server, patch management and so on.
Symantec helped me with a corrupted policy a few weeks ago and said we had the latest of the 7.6 stuff, so it's current (although 8 sounds interesting, not sure if our license permits a move to 8 and I'd never in a million try a full upgrade on a corrupted system!
I have seen these messages and have followed all the links -
https://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/patch-management-tasks-stuck-start-pending-and-not-showing-under-task-status
https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.HOWTO54534.html
I ran the report for the above using the currently running known tasks XML included and it showed a ton of failures, etc. A LOT.
I looked at this one as well but it's 6 bloody years old, for OLD versions!
https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH40277.html
And this one has a current date, but that's the modified date - it was written years ago and applies to 7.1 and 7.5 and we have 7.6 and it's not quite the same, close, but not exactly what I'm seeing - or is it?? and with our newer version, there's no way I'm going to try old scripts or queries for 7.1 against 7.6 database!
https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH46342.html
Would this one apply? To our version? And what does it mean to run those lines shown "truncase table etc."?
https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH218556.html
Any ideas please?
The start pending NEVER goes away, even a day or more later.
And if I stop a process that sits as above (and they ALL do), using the STOP button, then close, I get this -
I cannot distrubute a patch, cannot download a patch, cannot change a patch policy as after saving, it sits with this message
this policy is being reconstructed by the patch management distribution task
and it never does.........