ARD Not Active

I've had this problem repeatedly when trying to connect to my server. What I've found is that I must quit Remote Desktop and restart it. Then it recognizes that the server's ARD is active.

Activating/deactivating VPN seems to affect this as well.

I've also found that 're-scanning' a network range can both re find a changed DHP as well as changing the ARD status back to available.

Try to delete the machine from ARD and rescan or restart ARD. That usually works for me with the stubborn ones.

Remove the ARD client using the instructions here and then reinstall using the 3.1 client installer.

I think I have the same problem. Every few minutes on larger computer lists the status of ALL the clients would change to "unknown", "offline" or "ARD not active". Sometimes this also has been caused by scanning our larger or more populated subnets too.

The problem appears to be caused by the ARD agent crashing (but still shows up as a running process). I have a bug report in with Apple on this issue, i havent yet found a definite solution other than the workaround of constantly quitting and relaunching the ARD admin console.

Ive only seen this problem on Intel Macs and it is intermittent, sometimes the agent will load up correctly at boot, other times it wont. But the biggest impact for me has been when the ard agent crashes on the computer im running the ard admin console from, b/c when that happens, it changes the status of all clients in my ard lists.

In the past few days we started to suspect that Fast User Switching might be the cause of the ARD agent crashes. But I havent had a chance to test this theory yet...


Are you running the ARD admin console on an Intel Mac? Are the clients that are showing up as offline intel macs? Do you use fast user switching?

-William

The ARD Agent can not survive a FUS. If you check the process id before and after (or if you simply check the system log) you will see that it terminated and restarted.

On a client machine, the agent should simply "check in" with the admin again when it starts back up.

Doing a FUS on an admin machine will most certainly screw something up. Do not FUS with the Remote Desktop application running... you will not like the results.

I've had this a few times and found that if I create a client package using the Administrator application and install it directly on the offending computer using a CD or thumb drive it will work. Once the pkg is installed don't forget to "Upgrade Client Software" from Menu/Manage in Administrator. I've tried other methods and this works every time.