Dropping some FSP

(My post title is a nod to a Blues Traveler Song)

As much as I know about the System Center Configuration Manager product there are always more things to learn, and sometimes older things as well.  Recently I was doing some work regarding ConfigMgr Fallback Status Points (FSP).  For those that don't know, FSP were originally designed as a way for clients who were doing HTTPS communication to the management points (MP) to have an unauthenticated method to say "hey.., my certs are bad" and alert the SCCM admin to the problem.  Otherwise clients had no way to communicate their communication failure.

FSP still tend to be a role that most folks don't think about or use, but for certain situations it can be highly useful.  For example, when CCMEval runs and hits certain categories of issues it will send a message about client health back via FSP instead of MP.

There is a behavior of the FSP that many may not know and it revolves around the HKLM\software\Microsoft\CCM\FSP registry keys.  In here are two entries, HostName and IntranetHostName.  An interesting piece of information is how these are used.  In most cases the client will use the value in HostName when looking for the FSP.  If that is empty or the server is unreachable then the client will attempt to use the server listed in IntranetHostName.  If you have more than 1 FSP this might help you control and understand which clients will use which FSP.

Now to end with a Blues Traveler quote, just for fun:

"There's no such thing as a failure who keeps trying"