Extended hardware inventory - Adv Clients needing repair

[djsoden]

Issue:
I have extended my SMS 2003 hardware inventory to retrieve a series of registry keys we need for one reason or another. This has been working for years with no issue but recently about a 100 of my machines stopped reporting this data. All other data is accessible except for the registry data.

T-Shooting:
I can sucessfully login into a impacted machine, repair the client via the Systems Management icon, re-run mofcomp.exe and then force a manual inventory and all is back to normal. I have also created a repair client vbscript that runs the "msiexec /f \\servername\SMSClient\i386\client.msi /qn" and then the mofcomp task. This way also fixes the issue when run locally. For some reason though, the repair/upgrade functionality of the SMS console's Install Client feature does NOT achieve the same results as the manual processes. I re-run the mofcomp adverts by the way. Using an advert to run this repair client vbscript I created (as the system account) does not seem to work either. I have also even created an advert that runs the XP "schtask" command to create a scheduled task to run the repair client vbscript locally (as SYSTEM). That tasks triggers successfully but again... no joy on reporting the extended registry data

Any ideas:
Has anyone seen this type of an issue before?
Can anyone explain why I can resolve it manually (logged in as a Administrator equivalent) but not push that same fix out using the SYSTEM account or SMS system account?

Notes:
Client version = 2.50.4160.2000
Windows XP SP2
Windows Firewall disabled when on domain network
Manual running of Windows Update disabled by domain membership.

 

[djsoden]

I ran the script to repair the client as the user with their credentials and it worked. Note that I had to re-run the mofcomp process and h/w inventory before they showed up in my reports.

Guessing that when the client was installed that the advert and script were cleared out of it's cache so that's why the adverts were failing (unexpected restart).

Still confused why I couldn't run this as the system account or fix it via the admin console.

 

[tbrennans]

Perhaps you downloaded and ran sp2? Running an SP blows away changes to the mof, forcing you to re-run the sms_def.mof again on everything.

by the way, always add the changes from your old mof to the new sp sms_def.mof as it may have new default entries your old modified mof might not have.