I'm Rob Marshall, a consultant who specialises in the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager product. I like to share, i do so by blogging and helping out when I can in the MS SMS newsgroups and participating in the ConfigMgr MVP program.
I was awarded and joined the program in 2009. It'd be an understatement to say it has to be one of the best experiences an IT engineer can have, if they really enjoy specialising in a product.
My biggest weapon for troubleshooting is, my formidable knowledge, no, only joking, you, the community. I find if I cannot answer a question, then I can usually find the answer from using Bing\Google, pouring over the documentation, and if that doesn't work, tinkering in mine or someone elses virtual lab.
The blogs pretty much about ConfigMgr, but it is also a platform for me to express my random urges to display something I've stumbled across, and that I imagine would entertain you or what not as equally as it did me.
I've been seeing a few DP's reporting failure to process one or more packages.
Go to the DistMgr log and you can see it is refering to an invalid system name.
Why? Well, some environments might have reused sitecode but change the server name.
These systems predate me. What is odd is a system from 5 years ago (yes that long ago) appeared in a distmgr log file this week, anyway to solve this check out this great posting on the ConfigMgr support teams blog which does a great job on pointing out the steps needed to clean this up:
If you take a look at all the calls we get here in the SMS/ConfigMgr support group, this one would have to rank right up there in popularity. What happens here is the Distribution Point (DP) share, or the DP itself, is removed but you still have packages pointing to the missing resource.
Usually you'll know this is what happened because the distmgr.log shows something like the following:
Cannot establish connection to ["Display=\\<server>\<share>\"]MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=<site>"]\\<server>\<share>\ SMS_DISTRIBUTION_M ANAGER 17672 (0x4508)
Error occurred. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 17672 (0x4508)
Read more here: http://blogs.technet.com/configurationmgr/archive/2009/02/25/packages-may-try-to-access-a-distribution-point-that-was-removed.aspx