Defer history is not decreasing

Hi

I have the next scenario:

There is some other installation pending in the target computer, so my deployment won’t install. It says “Installation completed with exit code 1618”. Defer history shows that there is 1 deferrals remaining. User has not clicked neither “Defer” nor “Continue” during the maximum allowed 2 hours running time.

So when the deployment tries to run again after some hours, it says again, that user has 1 deferral remaining and that the “Installation completed with exit code 1618”. And this continues forever.

So it seems, that if the user doesn’t interact with the installation and there is some other installation going on (probably another PSADT installation), the deferral count doesn’t decrease.

What can I do in the situations like that?

An exit code of 1618 is an MSI exit code meaning that there is another MSI installation in progress. Every time you launch an MSI, the very first thing it does is try to grab the MSI_Execute mutex. if it can’t grab the mutex, then it knows that there is another installation progress and thus cannon continue. It fails with a 1618 exit code at that point. The toolkit is able to recognize this scenario and will wait up to 10 minutes for the MSI_Execute mutex to become available. If it does not, then it will fail with exit code 1618. SCCM will retry the push at a later time.

You can force the installation to continue if a user doesn’t respond in a timely manner. Look at some of the other options around how to control defers and timing of the installation.

Hi Muhammad!

Thanks for your answer.

Stupid me, of course the deferral count won’t decrease, otherwise there could be a possibility that the installation would never execute. I mean if there’s e.g. three deferrals and every time there is some other installation ongoing, then after the third deferral, when the installation would be mandatory, if there’s still some pending installation, my deployment would fail and never tried again.

I just have to figure out, why there’s always another installation running on some of my machines. Probably some bug or something is stuck. But that’s another story.

Thanks again