Extension attributes cleared by Recon policy

mags
New Contributor II

Hi there. In order to keep our extension attributes up-to-date, we have added a recon policy, to run once daily, with a script called as follows;

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/jamf recon
exit 0

When I run this script locally on macs, the recon command updates the extension attributes correctly, populating the database with the expected results, but when it runs as a policy, all the results are cleared out leaving no information in the extension attribute fields.

Can anyone help to shed light on this or advise how I can force an update to the extension attributes?

Thanks

10 REPLIES 10

davidacland
Honored Contributor II
Honored Contributor II

You can update the inventory using the maintenance payload in a policy. There is also a default policy called "Update inventory" that you could change the frequency on (it's default frequency is weekly).

bab09ba75f1d4a58a54005c26f0fc43d

jamesgreenMatte
New Contributor II

Hello. Every since we updated to the latest JAMFPRO, this is now happening to us as well on some Macs. We have alwasys had a daily update policy run through JSS, but has never been a problem until now. All of the Extension Attributes are empy!

jamesgreenMatte
New Contributor II

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thoule
Valued Contributor II

jamf does some weird stuff with process listings when it's running. You know how to list all processes with 'ps auxw' on a mac? Put that in a script and look for the jamf processes - they're filtered out! So I expect there's a bug somewhere with that process. As @davidacland says, just use 'update inventory' checkbox instead.

jamesgreenMatte
New Contributor II

This problem persists in our environment. We have a case open with JAMF but no progress for two weeks. We have determined that right after the upgrade to 9.100, any policy that has the checkbox for "update inventory" can trigger this behavior. It can manifest as all or most of the EAs being blanked out or the hardware record having no information in it or wrong information like a 0 where RAM and # of processors should be. Also as a result, the Macs that experience this issue also have an issue getting in through SSH or ARD. Or if I happen to get in and attempt to run any command manually I get sh. fork. resource temporarily unavailable.

clint5047
New Contributor III

We started seeing this issue around 9.97 or 9.98 and it has continued since. Some times it just refuses to update a specific EA, until we delete and re-create the EA. Other times it just wipes out all the EAs, like in mags' example.

jamesgreenMatte
New Contributor II

We continue to work with JAMF on this. Its still ONLY Macs that have 10.12.6 as the OS X version (all hardware models affected). No resolution and really no progress on JAMF's end. We continue to send logs but no closer to resolution. Again.. this started happening right after our upgrade from 9.96 to 9.100. I have not tried chuinder's solution of deleting and then recreating the EA but that seems extreme, and also wont help the blank hardware section of the JSS record. And still no explanation why the binary freezes up the SSH tunnel when this occurs.

cindy_jimenez
New Contributor II

Has there been any update on this? Just curious as I am seeing something similar with not all but some of our extension attributes not producing any attribute in the console but the scripts work fine.

Thanks.

Look
Valued Contributor III

Is this possibly related to the macOS updates being misnamed?
Sounds a lot like what was happening on the 10.13 machines when they were collecting pending updates during inventory collection and a misnamed update was upsetting the database.
Disabling Collect available software updates under Inventory Collection resolved that (although of course you could no longer see pending updates on machines in the JSS).

Boechat
New Contributor

Hey there!

I know that this is a very old topic, but I have started to see the same behaviour in Ventura and now Sonoma. Does anyone have found a solution?