Hello!

Very recently a user of salt got in touch with me about a bug when setting the job schedules up – when creating a schedule an owner is created. And only the owner (or sysadmin) can modify the schedule. So if the deployment account is not sysadmin then it needs to be the owner of the schedule.

Problem

An owner is identified by a SID, which is stored in a varbinary column in SQL Server, so when we set the SID variables in PowerShell they are stored as byte arrays. The issue here is that “–notmatch” doesn’t work as presumably expected in that case as shown below.

View the code on Gist.

Solution

What we have to do is to change it to something like….

View the code on Gist.

What we’re doing here is checking to see if there is any output when running a “Compare-Object” between the two SIDs. If there is then we cannot alter the schedule.  So only one line needed to be changed. Phew!

Additional Notes

This SID check only occurs when a user is NOT a sysadmin. So if your accounts have sysadmin in some environments but not others you’d see this occur only in those environments where the account running the task is NOT a sysadmin.

It’s also worth noting that this path is only taken when a schedule does not exist in the XML but does in the server – so as the behaviour here is to drop the schedule the task has to verify that if it is not a sysadmin then it is the owner of the schedule. Simples!