I am having an issue with package distribution to sccm clients where clients stop downloading the package without any errors or warnings. and report a waiting on contents status.
Initially, I noticed the issue when deploying Office 2007 to clients where I setup the advertisement for that package to start at an earlier time than the mandatory time to precache the contents. Monitoring the advertisement status report, I noticed 10% of the clients show waiting on contents status, did random spot check, and the package folder in the cache was either there with no files just folder structure, or it had BIT.TMP files.
The DatatransferService.log, ContentTransferManager.log, CAS, Exec, and the package/advert related log files didn't have any errors
On few clients, restarting the SMS Host service did the trick and triggered the download again, on others that didn't work; however, going to run advertised programs and manually selecting and running the program fixed the issue, on a third small group, reinstalling the client made it work.
The assumption was, the package was too big, and network hick up might have caused that to occur, or IIS on the DPs had issues and was interrupted, or the client had bad BITS install and failed downloading this large package. Later on, I found that this occurs with every deployment, small and large, and regardless of the way the advertisement is set up.
Any suggestions or assistance is very appreciated