ARD Task Server gathering reports even when reporting is disabled

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Level 1

30 points

ARD Task Server gathering reports even when reporting is disabled

We have noticed lately that at 2am each morning there is a considerable amount of network usage initiated by my task server presumably gathering reports from machines at different sites.

I had recently deleted all my computers in ARD, disabled reporting, and added them back in while making sure not to apply reporting features.

I have dug around in cron, LaunchDaemons, and plist files on the clients and on my task server. On my task server I see a plist that shows reporting is disabled on all the machines. At the client level I do not see anything regarding reporting.

Would it be a good idea to re-send an ard configuration package to all of the clients?

I opened a ticket with Apple, but they won't do anything without having purchased software support.

Mixed environment

Posted on Sep 10, 2009 7:50 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 10, 2009 9:06 AM in response to Ken_Edgar

Clients are given their reporting policy by the admin/task server. Deleting them from the list won't remove it.

You should be able to reset the clients reporting policies by selecting them in a list, bringing up the info window (Cmd-I), and then setting them to do no data collection under the reporting tab.

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Answer 2

Ken_Edgar Author

Level 1

30 points

Sep 10, 2009 9:09 AM in response to Brian Nesse

Thanks Brian, but I have tried that. What I didn't try however; and I wonder if this would force it; is to set the reporting up again per client using the info window... then go in and remove it again.

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Answer 3

Ken_Edgar Author

Level 1

30 points

Sep 10, 2009 9:20 AM in response to Ken_Edgar

Hmmm... I seem to have found the plist file that is doing it. I was looking at /Library/Application\ Support/Apple/Remote\ Desktop/ before... looks like /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ARDAgent.plist is the culprit.

This plist is a binary, so I had to use plutil to convert to xml in order to make it human readable. I wonder if I can just hack this file up a bit and re-deploy it to each machine. Or I wonder if it would re-build if I simply remove it from each client. I will need to test to find out, seeing as though the task servers are listed in it, probably not a good idea to remove it all the way.

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Answer 4

Sep 11, 2009 9:05 AM in response to Ken_Edgar

Yes the file will be recreated if you delete it. Safer might be to use "defaults" to delete the appropriate key(s). Sorry, I don't have any systems with active reporting policies, so I can't be any more descriptive than that.

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