I have a terribly weird situation within the SCCM environment I have recently taken over from someone who left. The issue is that clients dont seem to remain registered for more than a few days. I have become pretty proficient at getting the client to successfully register by reading all the posts; however, after a few days all my efforts are for not because the collections are back to only a few registered clients. Example: I have system patching collections (A,B,C,D) which query AD OU's - as of last night collection A had 160 out of 180 registered clients. This morning items in collection are only 45 (yeseterday it was 180) out of which only 8 are successfully registered (yesteday it was 160). To register them i do various things: delcerts to delete local cert re-install client via console if necessary delete ..cfg.ini and re-reploy agent completely uninstall / re-install client Again, after a few days, everything completely changes; collections vary in total items and lose over 90% of registered clients. Any clue that may help me figure out what is going on would be greatly appreciated.

Hi, What is the current setting for the Heartbeat discovery interval and the site maintenance task Client Install flag? Also do you have any Client Health tools installed that can mark the clients as inactive combined with deleting inactive clients?Kent Agerlund | http://scug.dk/members/Agerlund/default.aspx | The Danish community for System Center products

Kent, Heartbeat Discovery is currently "DISABLED" - is this something i should have on? "clear install flag" is also "DISABLED", no tools beyond those out of the box are installed, any specific tools i should consider?

I have no idea why anyone would disable either of those. I have never done that. Maybe he had a reason for it but enabling heartbeat would probably solve your problem. John Marcum | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jmarcum |

Hi, Enable the Heartbeat inventory and configure it for 7 days (default).Kent Agerlund | http://scug.dk/members/Agerlund/default.aspx | The Danish community for System Center products

AD Systems Discovery is the only method currenlty enabled; however, the GROUP A collection which should populate based on 3 AD OU's, isnt fully populating - might this be another issue or would you think its related? The 3 AD OU's combined have over 100+ comp objects, the SCCM collection however is only 44.

I have enabled heatbeat discovery, should i give time before clients begin registering themselves or am i going to have to go through my usual steps of getting clients to re-register? delcerts to delete local cert re-install client via console if necessary delete ..cfg.ini and re-reploy agent completely uninstall / re-install client

The clients should automatically get back into the configmgr console as clients. You can configure the heartbeat interval to a much lower value to start with.Kent Agerlund | http://scug.dk/members/Agerlund/default.aspx | The Danish community for System Center products

After enabling heartbeat discovery machines began automitcally rebooting due to PATCHES being installed - I verified this via the WUAHandler and UpdatesStore log. Would this be common? we do push out updates/patches via SCCM however all of out updates are set to "NOT REBOOT". I have since disabled heartbeat discovery as I cannot have uplanned system reboots. Am I safe or is there anything further i can do to ensure no additional systems reboot?

Rebooting and heartbeat discovery is NOT related.Kent Agerlund | http://scug.dk/members/Agerlund/default.aspx | The Danish community for System Center products

Thank you all for the responses, the suggestion seems to have worked. This monring my clients are mostly all registered succesfully. However, tracing the cause of the reboot, i found the offending patch to be part of an "updates" advertisement that occurred in May of this year. How is it possible for an advertisement to be executed months later? Moreover, can i assume that as agents where properly rediscovered all advertisements available got re-advertised and thus applied? More concerning is that although this particular "updates" advertisement had the "restart" optio UNCHECKED, systems still rebooted. Would setting a "maintenance windows" on my ALL SYSTEMS collection mitigate the risk of advertisement executing in the middle of the day?

Yes, a MW will help you just remember to configure it to be long enough for your updates to finish. By default each update requires 20 min in the MW (even if it finished in a single minut).Kent Agerlund | http://scug.dk/members/Agerlund/default.aspx | The Danish community for System Center products