The Realm of the Verbal Processor

ConfigMgr Documentation Error

This morning I was doing some research on Maintenance Windows. As part of that research, I was looking at the ConfigMgr documentation library at the “How to Set a Maintenance Window” page. On that page is the following quote:

Advertised programs with the Maximum allowed run time option set to Unknown will fail on collections with a maintenance window set if that window is set to less than 12 hours (the default run time setting for Unknown).

That didn’t sound right to me. I remembered sitting in a Hands On Lab at MMS this year where Wally Mead made the statement that “Unknown” was evaluated as 120 minutes by maintenance windows. So…which one is accurate? I sent off a quick email to Wally to find out. The response I got back was pretty amusing.

Apparently the ConfigMgr dev team originally had ConfigMgr set to evaluate “unknown” as 720 minutes (12 hours), then shortened it to 120 minutes…but then finally settled on ignoring it entirely. So…a patch/app that has “unknown” as the maximum allowed run time will not be restricted from running based on a maintenance window.

I asked Wally when this change took place, and he confirmed that this non-restriction was in the RTM version. So…regardless of which version of ConfigMgr you are running, an “unknown” run time program will not be restricted by a maintenance window.

December 3, 2008 - Posted by Jarvis | ConfigMgr