In my environment I push out a scheduled task which runs a PowerShell script. The PowerShell script sits on a network share. Recently, we changed the share where our scripts are stored, and as a result we updated the task to point to the new script location. The task used to work, but now it throws a Last Run Result error, with the return code 0xFFFD0000.
The task runs as SYSTEM. If I changed the task to run as my account, it worked. In my case, it was that the new script share has more restrictive permissions than the previous share did.
A process running as LocalSystem (NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM) or as NETWORK SERVICE authenticates on the network as the computer account. So the solution for me was to add Domain Computers onto my share’s permissions with read access (since I don’t need to write anything there).
The 2 takeaways here for me are:
-
SYSTEMuses the computer account (DOMAIN\COMPUTERNAME$) for network authentication. This is useful for scheduled tasks and Windows services if you run into issues. -
0xFFFD0000is very poorly documented (or poorly indexed in search engines), and it seems to indicate some kind of permissions or authentication problem.
Hope this helps someone!