Security for a day

My wonderful Forefront Client Security management console (or FCSMC for the party people) crashed and this lovely, helpful error appeared every time I attempted to load the console. This is bad, as  can’t really look or do anything with the console. Bad  FCSMC!

Or the easy to read version:

FX:{f337d96e-45c1-4106-88b1-e417a7703d6b}

Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.

Exception type:

System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException

Exception stack trace:

at Microsoft.ManagementConsole.Internal.SnapInMessagePumpProxy.OnThreadException(Object sender, ThreadExceptionEventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Application.ThreadContext.OnThreadException(Exception t)
at System.Windows.Forms.Application.OnThreadException(Exception t)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.InvokeMarshaledCallbacks()
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)

Now The server and console had been working fine for the last six months without issue. Despite no obvious alerts, warnings or errors in any of the Windows event logs or SQL logs/checks the standard fixes won’t work. Somewhat annoying, but having worked with Forefront for a while now, I took my default posture with these types of problems: Blame SQL.

After taking my problem to The Grumpy old DBA for “his”  SQL databases breaking again, he used his mastery of many years to cut and paste the error in to Google. Dominik’s Forefront Security Blog and this link popped up and refers to kb942581, which is a hotfix SQL script.

From the cause blurb on the page: “A server-side SQL stored procedure that the Forefront Client Security dashboard uses incorrectly calculates statistics when the managed computers have not reported to the collection server for more than 30 days.”

Running the script fixed the problem. Oh joy.