Possible bug in SP1 CU1 client - applications that supersede others may rollout unexpectedly!!!

[pxedave]

Folks,

 

You'll like this.

 

We were wondering why two packages recently uninstalled themselves from all our PCs without any warning. Eeak! It took a bit of digging but we discovered that currently (SP1 CU1), when you “supersede” an application with another, if the superseding (i.e. newer) application is then added to a Task Sequence and this Task Sequence is then made “Available” to a PC that has the superseded application installed, the client will automatically try and perform the upgrade shortly afterwards! Because our application happened to require a reboot before the newer version would installed, the first sign we got that something was wrong was when our users started reporting that the application had disapeard. Oh what fun!

 

Here’s what we did to replicate the problem:

 

a) Created application A and installed this on a PC.
Created application B and specified that this supersede application A (ticking the Uninstall option in the Supersede tab).
c) Created a new Task Sequence that includes only application B and made this Available to the PC.

d) The client will uninstall application A and install package B shortly afterwards.

 

The CCM client log AppIntentEval.log finally gave us the tip-off as it not only goes to the trouble of listing all applications within an available Task Sequence with each policy refresh, but it also reports the supersede uninstall/install.

 

I can’t find any documentation that warns that making an application Available via a Task Sequence (or even via a direct deployment but I haven’t tested that far) might trigger the automatic upgrade of any superseded applications, but I can't see how this should be default behaviour. I've raised an incident with MS so let's see what they say...

 

Dave

[pxedave]

Just in: MS Premier Support have reproduced this behaviour and (right now) admit that the client shouldn't be doing this by default. It's being escelated.

[Peter van der Woude]

Nice. Keep us posted.

[pxedave]

OK, Premier Support can reproduce this problem, confirm that there is no fix for this in R2 and also agree that this is not the best design. See their response below. In the meantime we are changing our procedures to make less use of superseed in the console, especially for anything included in our Task Sequences. Just to clarify, using superseed is fine when deploying Required deployments; the problem only appears when deploying software (individually or using a Task Sequence) using Available (and only to device collections, we believe)....

 

"I just wanted to keep you informed that this Issue is by Design as we are not able to change “Automatically upgrade any superseded version of this application” in UI when an App is targeted to Computer, As we are Deploying Application Via Task Sequence so at the background we have this option selected because of which Superseded versions of Applications are getting upgraded Automatically though Deployment setting Action is set to Available

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg682082.aspx

“Automatically upgrade any superseded version of this application – If this option is selected, any superseded versions of the application will be upgraded with the superseding application

I agree this is not a Good Design and already a Design Change Request(DCR) was filed for this Issue which is postponed for now and may be consider for future products, We had a very similar Bug but not the same Bug where Applications were getting Installed Automatically which is fixed in CM12R2 however as per my testing and discussion with Product group and Escalation Team this Issue is by Design.

I have marked this case against an Existing Bug and there will be no charges to your account for this case"