Recon choking on multi-GB iOS applications

[rtrouton]

I ran into an interesting issue this morning, when I was having a lot of trouble installing a QuickAdd on a 2008 MacBook Air. When installing, the Casper agent's inital recon (run as part of the installation process) hung on collecting mobile applications information. When I investigated, it appeared that the end user had a 3 GB iOS application that was causing the mobile applications part of the inventory to hang.

What was apparently causing the hang is that Casper, to inventory the mobile applications, copies the iOS app to /tmp, takes it apart and analyzes it. The process was hanging and looping when it hit this 3 GB application. I stopped the installer and uninstalled the parts of the Casper agent that had been installed, then tried again. On the second attempt, I hit the same loop.

After the second attempt, I stopped the installer and uninstalled the parts of the Casper agent that had been installed. I then went into the inventory options in our 8.4 JSS (located in Settings: Inventory Options: Inventory Collection Preferences: Mobile Devices) and unchecked the Gather mobile devices setting.

Once the inventory settings had been set to not gather mobile device information, I re-ran the installer. This time, it successfully finished in the normal amount of time.

I don't know if anyone else has run into a similar issue in their own environments, but I wanted to make sure to post it here.

Thanks,
Rich

[Chris_Hafner]

I've had a similar observation. In my instance recon got stuck on a 2.7 MB GPS app. Obviously this is a far cry from your 3GB app, but I wonder if there is a separate corruption going on. Unfortunately I'm tied up in a few other projects and haven't been able to even look at it beyond and into the reasons. Have you found anything on this?

[rtrouton]

Nope, hadn't looked into it further.

[tlarkin]

Hi Rich,

If you run recon in verbose mode, does it specifically spit out any error messages that are relevant to this issue?

sudo jamf recon -verbose

Thanks,
Tom

[rtrouton]

Tom,

Did you mean to address this to Chris?

Thanks,
Rich

[mm2270]

Hmm, honest question, but is there a valid reason to use this feature anymore in most environments? Its basically a leftover from before Casper Suite had a true MDM solution. It scrapes the synced iTunes db from managed Macs to get data on what kind of mobile devices and applications were out there. Seems to me its not much use anymore except to bloat your db and add unnecessary extra time to a recon.

What are you guys using that inventory collection for these days?

[tlarkin]

Hi Everyone,

Sorry I was just addressing my question to the original poster, but yes I am curious to see if recon in verbose mode kicks up any error messages. I see some cases that are related to this, but no defects on file. I am not in Cupertino this week so my test box with all my VMs is not available for me to test this at the moment. I just wanted to make sure this wasn't a bug on collecting mobile device information on OS X systems.

Thanks,
Tom

[Chris_Hafner]

I've got to go turn it back on (don't have much use for the feature at the moment). However, when I tried it with verbose logging it simply got stuck analyzing one of the iOS apps... just hung there for hours doing nothing. I can check it out early next week.