find machines that have stopped communicating with the JSS

[ImAMacGuy]

over the years of running the JSS, we've had machines stop communicating with the JSS, either through upgrades, or bugs, or what have you. They remain in the JSS, they have a machine name specified, but they don't report in for whatever reason. In the past I've had to go through and manually ping the machine and hope it responds, i it does, then I need to put the IP into C. Remote and try and see if that will remote enroll the machine again. 75% of the time it works, others not so much (depending on how long it's been).

Is there an easier way than the manual tedious process?

[rtrouton]

I've developed a solution for automatically repairing Casper agents if they aren't reporting in. The Facebook folks have also developed a similar solution and I based my work off of theirs.

I've posted the details at the link below:

http://derflounder.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/caspercheck-an-auto-repair-process-for-casper-agents/

[ahambidge]

@jwojda, while I don't have a method to re-enroll those machines, I did create a smart group and stick it on my dashboard so I can see how many clients are in that state. The criteria is below:

Model NOT LIKE %MacBook%
AND Last Check-In more than x days ago 30
AND Model NOT LIKE %VMWare%

I filter out MacBooks as most of the time they leave campus and we never see them again, and I don't have permission to have an externally facing JSS (yet...).

Hopefully this, and the post from @rtrouton help!

[ImAMacGuy]

@rtrouton: as always, genius! A few things that are a bit confusing to me though. You mentioned the following about the quickadd pkg..

in the main script, the quickadd_installer is set to casper.pkg - where did that name come from? I don't have anything called that.

Then to deploy, just bundle it up in a dmg file in the required locations and set it to install?