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Mark_Shoger
Level 4
Employee
In searching on how to coax the PST Locator task into completing the search of my numerous large NetApp shares (which seems to want to cycle every 24 hours, but that's another article), I was kindly directed to technote 294839, which also appears in the Admin Guide, to configure the PSTLocator.exe.config file to ignore certain shares.

Part of these instructions include the following:

1.    On the Enterprise Vault server that runs the PST Locator task, copy the existing "PstLocatorTask.exe.config" to a safe location.

2.    Browse to: \Program Files\Enterprise Vault

3.    Check to see whether the file 'PstLocatorTask.exe.config' exists in the folder:

·         If 'PstLocatorTask.exe.config' does exist, copy it to a safe location.

·         If 'PstLocatorTask.exe.config' does not exist, copy the file 'Example PstLocatorTask.exe.config', which is in the same folder, to 'PstLocatorTask.exe.config' in the same folder.

4.    Open "PstLocatorTask.exe.config in Windows Notepad.

5.    Search for <PSTSettings>.

6.    Immediately underneath <PSTSettings>, add a line to list the network shares that should be excluded. The syntax is as follows

<add key="SharesToAvoid" value = "share_1;share_2;share_3..."/>

where share_1, share_2, and so on, comprise a semicolon-separated list of the UNC paths of the network shares.

For example, to exclude '\\myComputer\C$' and '\\yourComputer\G$':

<add key="SharesToAvoid" value = "\\myComputer\C$;\\yourComputer\G$"/>

7.   Save the file and restart the PST Locator Task.

However, if these instructions are followed, upon starting the PST Locator task, your Symantec Enterprise Vault event log will quickly be filled pesky 40966 and 40967 errors, telling you that your config file is not formatted correctly and cannot be processed.

After much trial and error, and no luck with a web search, I discovered the proper format for this file. It should look like this:

<configuration>

      <configSections>
            <section name="PSTSettings" type="System.Configuration.DictionarySectionHandler" />
      </configSections>

      <PSTSettings>
            <add key="PopulatePstComputer" value = "true"/>
            <add key="SuppressRecordsManagement" value = "false"/>
            <add key="SharesToAvoid" value = "\\computername\sharename1;\\computername\sharename2"/>
      </PSTSettings>

</configuration>

Once saved, restart the PST Locator task and you should see it move smoothly to "Processing." In the reports directory, you will see the exclusions you've specified in the beginning of the log file. The scan for PSTs will begin in the next share on that computer.

I hope this is of use to others, as it was a major pain point for me. Ideally, the PST Locator task would remember where it left off and resume at that point. But this is a good workaround for now.

Comments
MichelZ
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified
Thanks Mark, this is definitely gona be helpful.

As another helpful thing, we have a product called "PST Flightdeck", which replaces the PST Locator job, and does only include shares you really want to scan. (so the opposite of the Locator, which just takes everything ;) )

http://www.evtools.net/products/pst-flightdeck

Cheers
Michel
DavidRa
Level 2

The documentation and example configuration file are both wrong - and this post is correct. Worked perfectly for me (and saved hours of scanning thousands of powered-off workstations to find out whether they were Filers or not).

Version history
Last update:
‎01-22-2010 12:06 PM
Updated by: