Since updating, my Apple Remote Desktop 3.7 is not working properly.

2nd day of doing what I did in an earlier post of mine. I did encounter this problem- I did a Unix command installing software updates. It did not complete all of the way, but most of it finished. I stopped the command.

After stopping the command, I was unable to send, control, or observe any computers. I had to restart my Imac and it went back to normal.

The Apple Tech guy did suggest, before we deleted the "com.apple.RemoteDesktop" folder, was to go into a back-up from "Time Machine" and bring in my previous version of ARD.

That will be my next move should my 'fix' start to 'unfix' itself.

tilly777's suggestion on dumping the Containters folder did the trick for us (lab with 32 10.7.5 iMacs). Have quit and started Remote Desktop several times today and all is still well so am hoping that holds true for tomorrow and on into the future as well.

My guess is that the 3.7 ARD update failed to modify all the necessary files in the com.apple.RemoteDesktop folder. Moving the bad version from the Containers folder forced Remote Desktop to create a new one with the necessary file language to make 3.7 work properly.

SVdP Eagle- keep your fingers crossed. Now I am having problems controling, and observing the computers that I choose. It returns:

Then it returned this:

SO..... I changed the Screen Sharing setting just for fun and still had no luck. Switched it back and I still have no capabilities to control or observe their computers. I can still send files, but I need the ability to control. I have retrieved my previous version of ARD and plan to go back to that. I'll keep you updated.

Well, I reverted back to the previous version from the latest backup in Time Machine. Installed it, but would not run because my client computers conflicted with that version because the were updated to 3.7 ARD. So for now, I will run this version until Apple has an update, but have a feeling that will be a while.

And now, I can not control, or observe my client computers, but I can send files, get info, and have a chat with them.

Yes, I see, they've misled me... why does that not surprise??

I'll check mine

S

Gotta love Google:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts4055

That should hopefully get you going

S

I hadt he same issue as everybody else, I have ARD 3.7 running on a combination of Mavericks and 10.8.5. My 10.8.5 machines can talk to my other 10.8.5 machines. None of my 10.8.5 machines could talk to my mavericks machine.

I checked the Firewall on mavericks, it was on and said that incoming connections to Apple Remote management were allowed. Mmm....

Turned off my mavericks firewall and I can now connect quite happily.

Not too happy about this as I want my firewall working properly. Its a bad world out there.

Looks like Apple dropped the ball yet again on it's admin software. OS X Server had gradually been going down the toilet, ARD could be going the same way.

The problem is related to DNS, DHCP and how ARD keeps track of machines. If you look at the com.apple.RemoteDesktop.plist in the containers> Library > Preferences folder you'll see that there are now both <hostname> and <hostnames> keys for machines. The hostnames key is an array and looks to be every DNS name every associated with the IP for that machine.

Problem is your DHCP reservations are short lived (ours are only 14 days - they used to be just 24 hours!) your computers will often get different IPs.

But ARD is doing some really bad stuff in how it internally resolves IPs, DNS based on what's actually on the network vs what's in its preference file.

I've had some luck quitting ARD, killing cfprefsd (so it can't overwrite my changes) and then doing some manual cleanup of the remote desktop preference plist to simply remove the hostnames key and array (it's not needed) and then correct any incorrect hostname keys (where it doesn't match the actual name key).

Doing this manually in TextWrangler has given me some relief. So now I'm looking to automate this with a bash or python script.

Apple has long had issues in ARD when machines in its database (especially ones not online) get a different IP.

But this 3.7 release is easily as bad as it's ever been. I have 3,200 Macs I manage and all are in my ARD Admin and it's rendered my ARD Admin almost unuseable at times.

I've filed radar://15488940 on this - if anyone else files on this please reference mine as a duplicate

Why do I feel like your name is so familiar, Bryan. I think I remember working with a Pietrzak, back in my USWest/Qwext/Dex days.

Any way... are all your client running 3.7 as well? or are there any 3.5.x or 3.6.x clients?

This issue that I am runnning into is that one of our remote offices is having 3.5.x clients dropping on and off the scans, or not showing up at all. I am running 3.7 admin. The odd thing is that my local office and another remote office is not doing this.

I know that ideally you want to run the same admin and clients. Sometimes that is not possible for me. But in this case I think i may have to reinstall an older version of the admin.

Mat

Agree. I'm running 10.8.4 MBA 11.6 inch (500) and admin is 10.8.5. No mavericks currently. 3.7 client and admin ARD

This really stinks.

I would like to add a 'me too' to this discussion. I too am no longer control my Macs using ARD. I have ARD running on Lion and Mavericks, and both have the same result. I can no longer connect to anything. I was able to connect to a server briefly this morning by toggling the Remote Management settings, but after a little bit, the issue came back. Quite frustrating.

Micah

HI Guys

Have you seen this topic?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5468647?answerId=23490652022#23490652022

Might be of some help to you.

Particularly this post from merced317 on local firewall.

If you can still SSH in to the machine, you should be able to do:

sudo /usr/libexec/ApplicationFirewall/socketfilterfw --getglobalstate

That should return:

Firewall is enabled. (State = 1)

Then you can run:

sudo /usr/libexec/ApplicationFirewall/socketfilterfw --setglobalstate off

That should return:

Firewall is disabled. (State = 0)

Now go ahead and connect with ARD. When you're done connecting with ARD, simply re-enable the firewall with:

sudo /usr/libexec/ApplicationFirewall/socketfilterfw --setglobalstate on

Since the connection is already established, you can safely enable the firewall once you've connected with ARD, you don't have to wait until you're done using ARD. Not the most elegant solution, but at least it's a short term workaround. If you're fast enough, you've only got to disable your firewall for a few seconds.

Hope that helps.