SMS 2003 - Troubleshooting: Non-clients

Like many SMS administrators out there, I have had my share of problems with clients. Primarily I have clients which work fine for a while, then just drop off the face of the earth. It could be because it's been turned off for longer than our security polices allow and thus falls out of AD, or it could be because of many other reasons which can only be explained by our users. (In other words, "why did you do THAT?")

This error message is one I will tackle in this post:

Software Distribution Site Settings for the client are missing from WMI. execmgr 9/15/2006 5:27:51 PM 2832 (0x0B10)

Essentially, this means that the Software Distribution Agent is not enabled on the machine. From my experience, there is a fast way to resolve this problem if you use the tool, Client Spy. (See my other post from today's date if you'd like to get this tool.)

A common problem I've seen on clients which exhibit this error is that they have no site assignment. In our environment, this is generally caused by the machine being assigned to an incorrect OU within AD. That is the first area I check. Once I have verified that the client is in the correct OU, I fire off discovery and wait for it to appear in the All Systems collection.

With Client Spy, I then assign the client to the proper site and start watching the client logs for activity. If execmgr.log does not indicate that the SD component has installed, I just use Client Spy to enable it, then (again with Client Spy) download and apply policies. Withing about 5 minutes, the SD agent gets enabled and I can perform the remaining tasks which I do in order to bring a client back to life: (All with Client Spy)

Full Hardware Inventory
Full Software Inventory
Verify Running SMS related services
Check Execution History
Re-verify Assigned Site, Client Version, GUID and MP

Generally, these steps will bring most clients back online and their gears start whirring and clanking.