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So we found a potentially weird bug in our JSS. We had an extension attribute that gathered the host name of a system (instead of the standard Computer Name field). There was then a Smart Group scoped to that EA to automatically perform some tasks.

Fast forward a year, and the host name EA gets deleted in a cleanup of old Extension Attributes. Our bad that we missed it. But instead of the Smart Group that used to depend on the EA simply returning zero systems instead of the dozen it used to return, it starts including extra random systems that should not never have been in the group, and executing policies on those systems.

Anyone else run into something like this?

Granted it was a problem of our own creation, but I would expect the Smart Group to be able to fail gracefully.

Sounds like you ran into this issue: https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/featureRequest.html?id=1659

Crazily, this is somehow by design, although most of the community seems to agree this is both nuts and dangerous. I wish JAMF would see it that way too and do something about it, preferably before some major catastrophe happens and hundreds or thousands of Macs get borked over it due to this simple issue that shouldn't even be a thing.

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