Hey everyone, we have had an odd ongoing issue for a little while now and it seems to be getting worse lately. Random MacBooks are becoming unmanaged and we have to run the quick add package in order to bring them back under management. These are machines that have been managed for any period of time, some months and others just weeks. Just had about 4 students bring their laptops in because they were unable to install firefox from self service. It was giving the message that the machine was not managed and they should run a local recon. Obviously recon does not work since it won't recognize any jamf commands. We are now on JSS 9.21 but have seen the issue in previous versions as well. Anyone else dealing with something like this?
Question
MacBooks randomly becoming unmanaged
The process isn't terribly relevant anymore, but that being said, I'll explain my logic at the time. You can still exclude MAC addresses but the problem isn't quite as acute.
It used to be that JAMF used the MAC address of the device as it's index record. So imagine if you were imaging 400 MacBook Airs and used 40 thunderbolt to Ethernet dongles to do it. Used to be that the database would report the MAC address of your imaging dongle as the MAC address of the device and each device you add would overwrite another one. Less than helpful. You would exclude the MAC address of your imaging dongle so it wouldn't report it's info to Casper. Page 440 of the Casper Admin Guide covers this particular issue.
That being said, newer versions of hardware/Casper implementations no longer rely on MAC address as an identifier...instead the UDID is used. I think this change came in Casper 9.0, BUT any existing records from before may include it.
So, these days I'm not to worried about it, but I usually take a second to exclude MAC addresses from my imaging dongles at the very least.
+10Oh, okay thanks. Came across this article because MacBooks are suddenly becoming Unmanaged and I was trying to figure out why. I am now looking into RTrouton's auto repair process:
https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/caspercheck-an-auto-repair-process-for-casper-agents/
Thanks
Mark
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