Hierarchy Maintenance Tool

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The Hierarchy Maintenance tool passes commands to the site's Hierarchy Manager while the Hierarchy Manager is running. You can use the Hierarchy Maintenance tool to diagnose problems in a site, to repair sites, to dump site control images, to distribute public keys, or to stop all SMS services at a site. You can find the Hierarchy Maintenance tool (PreInst.exe) in the SMS\bin\1386\<language> folder.

The Hierarchy Maintenance tool requires that you enable the Hardware Inventory Client Agent for the SMS site. This allows the client to determine whether or not particular servers are local to the client.

The Hierarchy Maintenance tool is both a repair tool and an important recovery tool. During a recovery operation, Recovery Expert directs you to use this tool primarily to: perform the following tasks:

  • Update package definitions at the recovering site with updates from the originating site, if the recovering site has packages inherited from upper level sites. After updating the recovering site, these changes propagate to lower level sites.

  • Restore any changes to feature configuration that were not backed up. Feature configurations are stored at the site control file, which is then forwarded to the parent site. You can use the Hierarchy Maintenance tool to dump the site control file from the parent site to the recovering site, so that the recovering site to be reconfigured the way it was.

  • Restore objects that were created after backup and that were lost when the site failed.

  • Dump site control files.

  • Securely exchange public keys between the recovering site, its parent and its child sites.

For more information about using Hierarchy Maintenance tool, see the SMS Help.

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