1E 8.1 (on-premises)

Downloading the following type of updates is enabled by default in the Nomad client (1E Client 4.1 and later). Downloading from Microsoft Update is also enabled by default.

The settings are defined in CompatibilityFlags and you will need to ensure the relevant bits remain set if you are using that registry value to configure other options, as follows:

To enable all the above, then AND bits 26, 27 and 28 with whatever you have already set in CompatibilityFlags.

Please refer toDistributing software with Nomad and Configuration Manager: Enabling Nomad for Applications and Software Updatesfor how to configure client settings to set Nomad as a download provider for applications and software updates.

Another difference is that Office 365 updates do not have a Configuration Manager-generated hash associated with the content. For other types of content, Nomad performs an AES256 hash check prior to, and immediately after, download and compares this with the Configuration Manager hash in order to establish the content's validity. For Office 365 updates, there is no comparison hash made available to Nomad. Nomad therefore depends on the CTR for the validity status of the Office 365 update installation (the CTR performs its own hash check). Nomad also listens to the status API exposed by the CTR agent to check if the installation succeeded. If the installation fails, Nomad deletes the update from its cache and retries the download. As soon as Nomad receives a download success status, it sends a status message and stops listening to the CTR agent.

In order to make the download process more efficient, Microsoft has implemented a process of byte-range requests rather than (or sometimes in addition to) requesting entire files. Nomad treats byte-range requests in just the same way as files and will initiate a local election for each to minimize the impact of any download across the WAN.

To process and download these byte-ranges, Nomad divides each Office 365 package file into pages of 128MB, for example a 300MB file has 3 logical pages. If we think of a file as a book, then each page of the book is 128MB with each line of a page being 32KB. The byte-ranges described in the manifest indicates the start and end position within our lines of the page. Nomad normalizes these byte-ranges to 32KB blocks, adjusting the start and end positions so that the byte-range contains complete lines and no line is truncated.

Elections may occur when a Nomad client requires content that is not resident in its cache. An election is not always necessary, with Nomad storing active download broadcast notifications in memory and then connecting direct to these hosts if itself requires the byte-range or file at some later time. All responses peers receive are stored in its Query Result Store (QRS). Before initiating an election, a Nomad client will first verify its QRS to see if relevant peers are available for content downloads. If relevant peer(s) are found in the query store, an election does not occur.

When elections do occur and Nomad clients respond, the receiving Nomad client sorts the list of responders top-down based upon the following criteria:

Under certain circumstances, a Nomad client will not reply to an election request, even if it has the data in its cache. This happens when: