Workgroup Clients Removed From Collections Overnight

Question

Hello,
We currently have a quite interesting case - we have some workgroup clients in our DMZ that receive their updates through ConfigMgr. The client installation was no problem, the clients report back and everything seems to work fine. We add them to update collections per direct rule, however each and every night they are removed from all collections except All Systems.
We have no idea what could be causing this - the are only 2 collections with incremental updates active, there are no maintenance tasks running that would cause this behaviour and there are no scripts running that could cause this. We also checked if the clients, for some reason, were reinstalling each night, but that's also not the case.
Does anyone know of anything else that could be causing this problem?
Cheers,
Fred

Answer 1

If the VMs are cloned and base VM was not syspreped beforehand, this could cause the problems you are seeing. You might be able to clean up the mess by completely removing the CM client, along with the Cert store for CM and the smscfg.ini, regkeys, and Reboot then re-install the CM client.

But it is a bad idea to create VMs from a base that hasn't been syspreped.

Answer 2

Are you sure that the maintenance tasks are not running? Does their resource id change every night? Where the system imaged from the same image or cloned?

Answer 3

Hi Garth,

yes, I'm sure there are no maintenance tasks running, that would remove these devices each and every night, unless they somehow become unknown devices - that's the only 'clean-up' task running every night. I'll keep an eye on the ResourceID and ask the DMZ guys how they created the Devices. I'll post the results on Monday.

Cheers,
Fred

Answer 4

Good Morning Garth,

the ResourceID changes every night, which leads me to believe the object is being recreated each night. The question is - why? I'm quite sure the CM Client doesn't repair or reinstall itself each night, but then again I just might not be seeing the tell tale entries in the logs. Do you have any pointers as to where I should continue looking from here?

Cheers,

Fred

Answer 5

Now that you know what the problem is. You need to track down why. I would start by finding out exactly how the server where created? Are they cloned,? Are they VMs? Did they get sysprep before deploying the image?