Prolong scanning

[vanith]

Has anyone run into a problem with the TNI taking forever to scan a workstation. I have about 700 workstations in my environment either running Windows 2000 / XP in a single Active Directory domain in a LAN. I have three workstations that are doing this, 2 of them are Windows 2000 and the last one is Windows XP. I will gather more information from it tomorrow, but I have left it on a pecticular scan of 1 Windows 2000 workstation for over 4 hours and it still was not done scanning. The rest of the workstations would take no longer than 3 minutes to finish compared to these three.

 

I will keep everyone posted because it's strange indeed.

 

Vanith

[Support]

Vanith,

 

A scan thread can sometimes hang forever if, for example, the scanned computer was shut down or the connection was lost. This issue will be addressed in the next release of the program, where all scans will be checked for activity constantly and they will stop with "Connection lost" status if that happens.

Meanwhile you should use "Stop" button and it will close all hanging threads in 3 minutes.

This can also be caused by some problem in the computer's WMI configuration, however it happens very rarely. In this case, you should set the program to use direct WMI scan only ("Options - Connection", set "Connection method" to "Agent-free connection" and uncheck the option "Try another method"; also open "Options - Inventory" and set the option "Show detailed status messages during scan process"), then try to scan that computer again. Tell us the status at which the program will stop scanning.

[vanith]

Vanith,

 

A scan thread can sometimes hang forever if, for example, the scanned computer was shut down or the connection was lost. This issue will be addressed in the next release of the program, where all scans will be checked for activity constantly and they will stop with "Connection lost" status if that happens.

Meanwhile you should use "Stop" button and it will close all hanging threads in 3 minutes.

This can also be caused by some problem in the computer's WMI configuration, however it happens very rarely. In this case, you should set the program to use direct WMI scan only ("Options - Connection", set "Connection method" to "Agent-free connection" and uncheck the option "Try another method"; also open "Options - Inventory" and set the option "Show detailed status messages during scan process"), then try to scan that computer again. Tell us the status at which the program will stop scanning.

 

 

It is stuck on Win32_LogicalDisk on Windows 2000 machines.

[kmt]

don't want to ad anything. I'm using a different inventory solution. it doesn't have these problems, as they use custom developerd agent-scanning, unlike TNi. nothing hangs. you should consider trying another solution, if this one doesn't help you, admin fellow.

[Dobbie73]

On a related note .... I am running TNI 1.6.0 Build 1434 on a W2K3 SP2 Server (Intel Xeon 2.8GHz processor, 4GB RAM - plenty powerful enough!), but in recent days, I have been unable to complete a scan. We have approx 500 machines, of which 450-odd are Windows XP SP2/SP3, and the remainder are W2K3 Servers (no SP/SP1/SP2).

 

I have set up groups - servers, agent machines, admin machines etc - and when I scan I tend to scan by group. But whether I select a group and rescan by selected category, start a new scan by IP address range, or by selecting from a domain list, the machine names resolve quickly and correctly and the scan kicks off .... so far so good. Then within a minute or two, the scan seems to freeze up, and TNI stops responding. If I go away for 30 minutes and come back, the process is still running, but the GUI has disappeared! So I have to crash out and generate a Microsoft error report (which I don't send).

 

Any hints or thoughts as to how I can get around this? As at the moment, TNI is just not usable!

[vanith]

don't want to ad anything. I'm using a different inventory solution. it doesn't have these problems, as they use custom developerd agent-scanning, unlike TNi. nothing hangs. you should consider trying another solution, if this one doesn't help you, admin fellow.

 

 

Actually, out of 700 workstations/servers/external Jet direct devices, we have had only 60 computers that have come back with various problems. Most of those problems are either a Firewall, DNS (on our side), spyware, or this prolong scanning. Out of the 60 workstations, there are probably less than a hand-full that are giving us this prolong scanning problem. All of them are Windows 2000 machines, so I'm troubleshooting further why it's doing this.

 

This product has saved us a lot of time since we do not have the human resources to scour all of these devices to find out the information as we are close to meeting our deadline for full inventory of our network. We only have a single AD/Novell Domain here and it's work wonders for us. Less than 10% of our network has been identified as having problems and non-compliant to our inventory, for us, this is a lot easier to do.

[vanith]

On a related note .... I am running TNI 1.6.0 Build 1434 on a W2K3 SP2 Server (Intel Xeon 2.8GHz processor, 4GB RAM - plenty powerful enough!), but in recent days, I have been unable to complete a scan. We have approx 500 machines, of which 450-odd are Windows XP SP2/SP3, and the remainder are W2K3 Servers (no SP/SP1/SP2).

 

I have set up groups - servers, agent machines, admin machines etc - and when I scan I tend to scan by group. But whether I select a group and rescan by selected category, start a new scan by IP address range, or by selecting from a domain list, the machine names resolve quickly and correctly and the scan kicks off .... so far so good. Then within a minute or two, the scan seems to freeze up, and TNI stops responding. If I go away for 30 minutes and come back, the process is still running, but the GUI has disappeared! So I have to crash out and generate a Microsoft error report (which I don't send).

 

Any hints or thoughts as to how I can get around this? As at the moment, TNI is just not usable!

 

I did all of my workstation scanning on a simple HP 5100 desktop then shared out the database storage on a server because we don't have those kinds of resources at our disposal. I have read other posts that if it freezes up on you like that, try scanning a smaller section to see if that works.

[Support]

Dobbie73,

We are currently discussing this with you via email. This issue is somewhat different from the one discussed here, because program freeze is the issue of the main admin module which runs on administrator machine or a server, while prolong scanning is an issue of client computer which is being scanned. The program actually does not require too much CPU power or too much memory, a relatively modern workstation can make the job as good as a powerful server. However, this case seems to be about some peculiarities of the hardware+OS combination.

 

Vanith,

Do these computers have some uncommon configuration of storage media? (as the issue is in Win32_LogicalDisk class). Do they have the latest updates?

You can try to make local scan with the standalone tool "tniaudit.exe" (It will generate an XML file which should be put to the "Data" folder of the program. This newly scanned computer can be added to the network tree by selecting "Tools - Refresh data storage folder" menu option).

[vanith]

Dobbie73,

We are currently discussing this with you via email. This issue is somewhat different from the one discussed here, because program freeze is the issue of the main admin module which runs on administrator machine or a server, while prolong scanning is an issue of client computer which is being scanned. The program actually does not require too much CPU power or too much memory, a relatively modern workstation can make the job as good as a powerful server. However, this case seems to be about some peculiarities of the hardware+OS combination.

 

Vanith,

Do these computers have some uncommon configuration of storage media? (as the issue is in Win32_LogicalDisk class). Do they have the latest updates?

You can try to make local scan with the standalone tool "tniaudit.exe" (It will generate an XML file which should be put to the "Data" folder of the program. This newly scanned computer can be added to the network tree by selecting "Tools - Refresh data storage folder" menu option).

 

The standalone tool worked like a champ. I will flag the workstations in question and see what I can do with those after our deadline has be met.

 

We are upgrading all of our old workstations to Windows XP and most likely these machines will be replaced if they do not meet our requirements for upgrade, so it will give me the chance to sideline them and figure out more information about them in a couple of months.