recurring check-in not reliably working

[DirkM2012]

Hello everybody,

I'm on JSS 9.81 and have recently noticed that about half of my machines are not checking in at the recurring check-in interval. I noticed this first because they were not getting some updated policies and EAs didn't return the values they should have.

I have a few test machines, all recently build with 10.10.5 and 10.11.2. All test machines belong to the same Smart Computer Groups and have the same policies in their scope. For testing I changed the check-in interval to 15 minutes and set all machines to not go to sleep.

On two of the 4 test machines I can see jamf running a few times every hour, checking policies triggered by "recurring check-in". The other two machines only trigger a check-in when the network state changed or the machine is restarted. Running sudo jamf policy or sudo jamf manage always works and updates JSS properly.

All 4 machines show the following if I run sudo launchctl list | grep jamf

-       0   com.jamfsoftware.task.Every 15 Minutes
4278    0   com.jamfsoftware.jamf.daemon

On one of the two machines that didn't do the recurring check-in yesterday, it started working after I ran sudo jamf policy and sudo jamf manage. But after a few hours the were no more recurring check-ins.

Reinstalling QuickAdd.pkg didn't make a difference, changing the check-in interval didn't make a difference either.

This is how the jamf.log looks on the machines that don't check-in properly:

Mon Dec 14 08:33:13 mobuild1pca72 jamf[7211]: Checking for policies triggered by "recurring check-in"...
Mon Dec 14 08:33:16 mobuild1pca72 jamf[7211]: Executing Policy CheckAppleSoftwareUpdate...
Mon Dec 14 08:33:28 mobuild1pca72 jamf[7211]: Executing Policy Update Inventory...
Mon Dec 14 08:58:59 mobuild1pca72 jamf[7704]: Checking for policies triggered by "recurring check-in"...
Mon Dec 14 08:59:02 mobuild1pca72 jamf[7704]: Executing Policy CheckAppleSoftwareUpdate...
Mon Dec 14 08:59:13 mobuild1pca72 jamf[7704]: Executing Policy Update Inventory...
Mon Dec 14 09:18:59 mobuild1pca72 jamf[8314]: Checking for policies triggered by "recurring check-in"...
Mon Dec 14 09:19:03 mobuild1pca72 jamf[8314]: Executing Policy CheckAppleSoftwareUpdate...
Mon Dec 14 09:19:18 mobuild1pca72 jamf[8314]: Executing Policy Update Inventory...
Mon Dec 14 10:04:01 mobuild1pca72 jamf[8849]: Checking for policies triggered by "recurring check-in"...
Mon Dec 14 10:04:04 mobuild1pca72 jamf[8849]: Executing Policy CheckAppleSoftwareUpdate...
Mon Dec 14 10:04:16 mobuild1pca72 jamf[8849]: Executing Policy Update Inventory...
Mon Dec 14 10:51:01 mobuild1pca72 jamf[9328]: Checking for policies triggered by "recurring check-in"...
Mon Dec 14 10:51:04 mobuild1pca72 jamf[9328]: Executing Policy CheckAppleSoftwareUpdate...
Mon Dec 14 10:51:15 mobuild1pca72 jamf[9328]:   Inventory will be updated when all queued actions in Self Service are complete.
Mon Dec 14 10:51:15 mobuild1pca72 jamf[9328]: Executing Policy Update Inventory...
Mon Dec 14 13:42:18 mobuild1pca72 jamf[10106]: Checking for policies triggered by "recurring check-in"...
Mon Dec 14 13:42:21 mobuild1pca72 jamf[10106]: Executing Policy CheckAppleSoftwareUpdate...
Mon Dec 14 13:42:32 mobuild1pca72 jamf[10106]: Executing Policy Update Inventory...
Mon Dec 14 15:15:54 mobuild1pca72 jamf[10639]: Checking for policies triggered by "recurring check-in"...
Mon Dec 14 15:16:04 mobuild1pca72 jamf[10639]: Executing Policy CheckAppleSoftwareUpdate...
Mon Dec 14 15:17:19 mobuild1pca72 jamf[10639]:  Inventory will be updated when all queued actions in Self Service are complete.
Mon Dec 14 15:17:19 mobuild1pca72 jamf[10639]: Executing Policy Update Inventory...
Mon Dec 14 16:39:09 mobuild1pca72 jamf[11286]: Checking for policies triggered by "recurring check-in"...
Mon Dec 14 16:39:12 mobuild1pca72 jamf[11286]: Executing Policy CheckAppleSoftwareUpdate...
Mon Dec 14 16:39:25 mobuild1pca72 jamf[11286]: Executing Policy Update Inventory...
Mon Dec 14 16:59:31 mobuild1pca72 jamf[11963]: Checking for policies triggered by "recurring check-in"...
Mon Dec 14 16:59:34 mobuild1pca72 jamf[11963]: Executing Policy CheckAppleSoftwareUpdate...
Mon Dec 14 16:59:48 mobuild1pca72 jamf[11963]: Executing Policy Update Inventory...
Tue Dec 15 00:03:50 mobuild1pca72 jamf[12496]: Checking for policies triggered by "recurring check-in"...
Tue Dec 15 00:03:55 mobuild1pca72 jamf[12496]: Executing Policy CheckAppleSoftwareUpdate...
Tue Dec 15 00:04:06 mobuild1pca72 jamf[12496]: Executing Policy Update Inventory...

Older posts seem to indicate that jamf can be unreliable if scripts or policies cause it to hang. But in my case this doesn't seem to be the issue since jamf exits properly and always starts when run manually.

Am I correct saying that regardless for the policies in scope in JSS, the launchdaemon should always trigger jamf to run at the check-in interval? Is there any other log that might show why jamf is not triggered?

As I sit here and type this post my test machine that I took the log shown above from decided to trigger the recurring checking after sitting almost 7 hours idle.

Tue Dec 15 00:03:50 mobuild1pca72 jamf[12496]: Checking for policies triggered by "recurring check-in"...
Tue Dec 15 00:03:55 mobuild1pca72 jamf[12496]: Executing Policy CheckAppleSoftwareUpdate...
Tue Dec 15 00:04:06 mobuild1pca72 jamf[12496]: Executing Policy Update Inventory...
Tue Dec 15 06:57:03 mobuild1pca72 jamf[13531]: Checking for policies triggered by "recurring check-in"...
Tue Dec 15 06:57:06 mobuild1pca72 jamf[13531]: Executing Policy CheckAppleSoftwareUpdate...
Tue Dec 15 06:57:18 mobuild1pca72 jamf[13531]:  Inventory will be updated when all queued actions in Self Service are complete.
Tue Dec 15 06:57:18 mobuild1pca72 jamf[13531]: Executing Policy Update Inventory...

Does anybody have any idea for how to make the jamf binary run more reliably?

Thanks,
Dirk