In this scenario the customer is trying to image systems from within WinPe. They are able to select a task sequence, but then once policy dependencies evaluate the customer receives the “An error occurred while retrieving policy for this computer (0x80004005) message. This is much a generic error and I’ve covered how to fix a dozen or so different errors in my Troubleshooting OSD Task Sequences document that I’ve have been meaning to publish for a few years, but I have given it to various customer accounts over the years.
This error is reported as happening right after the task sequence selection occurs when the system looks up policy for the system. Task sequence the log file is in ram you will see it at X:\Windows\Temp\SMSTSLog\smsts.log
We can see in the log file there are problems communicating with the management point retrieving policy during the lookup. The usual troubleshooting of making sure sccm is functional, boundaries, etc can be skipped since we know the specific problem and we have the historical knowledge of the IIS Connections This environment just recently had a SCCM outage and there was a significant amount of policy request backlog for the environment to catch up. At the time of the customers attempts to run an OSD tasks sequence the IIS connections was set to 500, and needed to be raised to a higher number, or to unlimited (depending on how quickly the backlog of policy requests progressed) That will be covered in another blog-post as the situation is still being monitored.
If you access your SCCM Site Server. In this environment the MP co-located. Open up IIS > navigate to your Default Website > Configure Limits
This was originally set much lower to 500 to let the CPU usage drop to a more stable rate to process though policies etc. I would recommend if trying to recover from high CPU usage due to a number of different reasons that you limit the connections and gradually increase that number.
The customer was then able to start imaging systems once the number was increased. When you are trying to recover sccm services make sure you keep an eye on the cpu usage in case you have to throttle that number back down, or if you can keep increasing the connections number.
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