Looking for guidance

Hi,

I would look at the Extension Attributes that you configured. If one of them freezes, the recon will freeze. Try to execute them on an affected computer.

Let us know how it goes

Thank you @ftiff I appreciate the response. I have to ask, I have borrowed from JAMF Nation various extension attributes. I was under the understanding that the extension attributes are on the JSS side for pulling in additional information such as JAVA version and so forth. Are you saying one of these attributes in the JSS could cause the communication to fail on the client side?

Well, all Extension Attributes (script ones anyway) get pulled down to the Mac and run locally to gather the relevant information, and then the results are uploaded back up to the computer record in the JSS. So while the EAs themselves live in the JSS, each Mac must run them all locally against itself to get the info each EA is gathering. Sometimes those EAs can be slow or cause delays if they are malformed in some way.

Also, are you capturing things like Application Usage data and/or calculating home folder sizes? Those can also be slow and cause problems with recons. What I'd do is systematically turn off some of the inventory collection items. Another one to look at it is if you are grabbing Apple Software Updates. Turn off items one at a time and see if those Macs can start submitting inventory again. There may be one item in the collection that is causing this to happen.

Thank you @mm2270 this is very helpful. I can certainly check into this. Crazy thing though, if one Mac is behaving this way, wouldn't we anticipate that other computers of the same model and hardware act the same way?

My JAMF support call did find an error in our JSS server log and she is thinking there might be a problem with this that must get resolved first. There could be a correlation between the error and the Macs not updating inventory.

Thanks for the insights though, this is very helpful. I will narrow down the list of EAs and see if this helps us out.

@mconners I forgot to mention in my post above, but something else to try is running recon in verbose mode on machines that are getting stuck. It may reveal what point in the inventory collection they are getting hung on.

sudo jamf recon -verbose

I'd also recommend just running a sudo jamf policy from the Terminal as it will test certificate based authentication to your JSS web apps. I have seen issues where devices will check in but not run or submit anything because of the do_not_upgrade key being flagged in a jamf plist file. No idea if this is your issue or not, but it is something I would try.

I would imagine if your extension attributes where the issue it would be more of a constant issue versus intermittent since those run on every single Mac regardless at reocn. However, I have seen stranger things then that so it could be possible.

Thank you @tlarkin you information was good to have, unfortunately when I ran the sudo jamf policy, I get the response, This policy trigger is already being run as root with some numbers after it. I am guess, this number is the policy ID.

After this didn't run, I tried again, the sudo jamf recon -verbose and it hangs right after the message, The JSS is available. It's great it finds the JSS, but nothing else happens.

I agree with your assessment the the EA piece would be more wide spread.

@mconners Did you ever get this resolved? Running into the exact same thing on Jamf 10.10.1.

Hello @rhyde I don't recall the specifics on what we found to be honest. I would check to verify the MDM capability is set to Yes and not No. In one of our situations late in 2018, we had a number of Macs where for some reason, they switched over to No. There wasn't a thing we could do about that but to wipe and re-image these that showed up this way. If this doesn't help, I would check in with Jamf support.

You could also try to reinstall the quick add package to see if this repairs the binary.