Change the "Fast Retry" interval for Package and Program deployments

[Ryan Steele]

Hi all,

I've created a Package and Program for a driver update utility I'm deploying which I've configured to run on a schedule. I've configured my script to exit with error code 1618 (the "Fast retry" exit code) under certain conditions (the computer is running on battery, or an update would require a hard reboot and the user chose to defer).

Unlike the Application model, which I believe has a retry interval of 4 hours when a "Fast retry" exit code is returned, my Program seems to re-run after only 10 minutes.

I found some information that indicated this setting is stored in the Site Control File. From this article on Anoop's site, I learned that as of SCCM 2012 this file is stored in the DB and used the query provided to view it. Sure enough, I think I've found the relevant property under the "Software Distribution" CLIENT_COMPONENT node: "Execution Failure Retry Interval", but editing this directly appears to be unsupported and scary.

Is there any supported way to change this interval?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@Ryan Steele 

It's actually not unsupported or scary really, it's all just WMI.  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/develop/core/understand/how-to-read-and-write-to-the-site-cont... covers the details (although this does make it look way more complicated that is really is particularily if you use PowerShell). The method that I think you are referring to on Anoop's site though is directly editing the DB which isn't supported though.

Test in your lab environment first of course.

This also sounds like a great blog topic and I haven't created a new one in a couple of months now, so maybe I will this weekend.

[#3]

@Ryan Steele As a follow-up here, I reached out to the product group as I was going to write some sample code for you, but alas, the SDK documentation is out of date 🤨. I'm trying to figure out what the best and supported path is though.

[#4]

@Deleted Thanks Jason, much appreciated!

As a workaround, I modified my script to pause for 20 minutes before exiting with error code 1618, but this isn't ideal as it blocks other updates from installing during that interval. 

[#5]

@Deleted I'd be very interested in what is the best and supported path too.