How to stop SSIS from “Phoning Home”

Question

Working on maintaining a substantial set of SQL Server Integration Services 2008 R2 packages, I've run into an oddball problem.

These packages make frequent use of Script Tasks, each containing C# code used to integrate with some internal Web Services.

Editing one of those scripts involves these steps:

• Select the Script Task in the designer
• Right click, select Edit to bring up the Script Task Editor dialog
• Press the Edit Script button
• Wait (just over) 15 seconds
• Edit the script
• Close the script editor
• Press the OK button on the Script Task Editor dialog
• Wait (just over) 30 seconds
• Dialog disappears

It's the waiting, highlighted in bold, that's getting me frustrated.

There's no CPU activity, no disk IO, no network traffic during those times - the editor appears to be just frozen.

BTW - those timings are reliable - I've used a stopwatch to measure them over the past couple of days and they vary by less than my accuracy in hitting the start/stop button on the stopwatch.

The only clue I've been able to find is that netstat shows an extra network connection during the pause:

C:\>netstat -o -b

Active Connections

  Proto  Local Address          Foreign Address        State           PID
  TCP    fsis-datam-dev2:3478   akamai-9.fx.net.nz:http  SYN_SENT        700
  [VSTA.exe]

My current hypothesis is that the delays are some kind of timeout as SSIS (or perhaps the Visual Studio Tools for Applications editor) "phones home" for some reason. The machine in question doesn't have internet connectivity, so the requests are in vain.

Answer 1

Yes, your guess is correct and this is a (fairly) well-known issue. The .NET runtime contacts crl.microsoft.com to check for revoked certificates; if your machine has no internet access then the runtime waits until the connection attempt times out, which can result in SSIS packages starting very slowly, Visual Studio apparently locking up etc.

Common fixes are to allow internet access to crl.microsoft.com only, or to use the local HOSTS file to redirect the name to 127.0.0.1.