Monday 11 August 2008

HMC 4.5, DomainCacheTask Scheduled Task

I have found several more small configuration issues with the deployment instructions for HMC 4.5. Again, after finding no relevant resources on the Internet about this small issue I thought I would blog it here to hopefully help someone else.

When attempting to create the SMTP Domain Cache scheduled task the instructions give you the following syntax to run against the Schtasks command in Windows Server 2008.

schtasks /create /S localhost /U %USER% /P %PASSWORD% /SC MINUTE /MO %MINUTES% /TN SmtpDomainCacheTask /TR "\"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Hosting\Provisioning\SmtpDomainCacheTask\SmtpDomainCacheTask.exe\""

When I run this command (replacing %USER%, %PASSWORD% and %MINUTES%, I received the following error message; ERROR: User credentials are not allowed on the local machine.. Of course Google is my first stop for all unknown error messages, and again I found no documentation referring to this error.

To be entirely honest, as Windows Server 2008 is still new to me I had to go and research the Schtasks syntax and switch options. From what I understand the /U and /P switches are more appropriate for when you are scheduling a task on a remote machine and are therefore passing credentials to allow you to create the scheduled task. If I understand the Note: The user account must have write permission to the directory of CategorizerOverrideAgent.dll, and have read permission to MPS PlanManager database. I believe what is actually required is the user context in which you want to run the task. Therefore the switches required are /RU and /RP.

schtasks /create /S localhost /RU %USER% /RP %PASSWORD% /SC MINUTE /MO %MINUTES% /TN SmtpDomainCacheTask /TR "\"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Hosting\Provisioning\SmtpDomainCacheTask\SmtpDomainCacheTask.exe\""

This command now schedules correctly for me.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Also had the same problem while setting up my hmc 4.5
There are some bugs in the documentation..
Thank you

Regards,

Tim

Anonymous said...

Also had the same problem.
There are some bugs in the documentation for HMC4.5
Thank you.

Unknown said...

Thanks I was having the same problem.

Anonymous said...

Thank you

Regards,
Benjamin

Rami said...

You saved my Day...Thank you

Sagar said...

Hi Brian,

Thanks for your article. I want to schedule a task on local machine unattended. It's looks like the following command is not working when logged off from the system. It's working fine when I logged in. Your help will be appreciated.