Ideas on how to track retired mac's that are later re deployed, some times months later.

I have the same problem. This is what I've been thinking about...

Set the machine record to an unmanaged state. Even unmanaged, they will 'check-in' and give you a value you can search on. From there, create a Smart Group looking for 'unmanaged' and a Last Contact range.

Problems I see are one, Last Contact does not let you select something like 'less than x days ago', so you'd have to use 'after' and keep changing it to whatever you like. Second, you would need some communication from the field that a machine is going 'dormant'. I don't get that.

@dpertschi, what version of the JSS are you running? Last Contact Time is Less than X Days Ago was added as a feature several revs ago. I use that all the time.

Well good news that option is there now, I would love to have that. Bad news is I'm held hostage at JSS 8.1 at the moment.
Grrrrrr.

We had the same problem and added an extension attribute for "machine status" where we have a drop down list for values "Storage, retired, active, waiting repair" . As we unmanage a machine that is going into a status other than active, we have to set the attribute. THis way when we run reports, we can look for any mac by status.

@brussell that sounds cool. Could you be able to elaborate "extension attribute for "machine status" where we have a drop down list for values" ? is this to do with API?

Hi Everyone,

When I was a System Administrator, and we would do life cycle roll outs, we were taking 6,000 laptops off line and out of Casper and rolled 6,000 new laptops in. Now, we owned the old 6,000 laptops, and we planned on reissuing them. However, I did not want 14,000 Macs in my JSS (we had about 2,000 desktops as well) if they weren't being used on a regular basis. So, I mass unmanaged the older Mac laptops, and then enrolled all the new ones via imaging time. Then, whenever we took the older ones and put them back into production somewhere they got updated with a newer image, which then re-enrolled them into the JSS.

Unfortunately, there is no real good way to mass unmanage from the JSS, so I used scripts and also created a PKG with no payload and a post flight script that could also be used in ARD Admin, since once it is unmanaged you lose control of it.

This also allowed us to sustain on 8,000 licenses for Casper and not have to purchase 14,000 for machines that we may, or may not re-purpose in production.

Thanks,
Tom