What to Expect from Active Scanning?

[mgmzone]

I am wondering what to expect from ActiveScanning. I installed Lansweeper over the weekend and updated our global login script with lsclient.exe. Serveral hundred clients were added over a 12 hour period (typical use for a weekend) before I turned on Active Scanning. Since turning on Active Scanning I know have 1500 PC's identified, 226 servers, but 742 are showing RPC server unavailable. I notice that numbe fluctuating up and down whenever I refresh.

I have just over 3000 active PC clients, but over 5000 in AD, so there will be something less than 2000 clients that are "stale" in AD. I currently have 80 threads configured on the server.

So now the questions:
- Should I remove lsclient.exe from the login script, or is a combination of lsclient.exe and active scanning a good solution?
- Active scanning has been running now for almost 3 days, and clients are still being identified. Does the process merely import from AD, or does it pull a list from AD and then attempt to communicate with the discovered machines?
- Is the RPC error something I can expect to resolve itself? We have a GPO in place that turns on file/print sharing, and configures the XP firewall, so that shouldn't be an issue. 95% of our PC's are configured using standard desktop images, and users are prevented from making too many changes.
- I guess I am wondering if what will end up happening is my 3000 clients will be correctly identified and updated, and then the 2000 or so that are in AD but are no longer in production are goingn to show up as unavailable?

Please correct my thinking if I have made some incorrect assumptions.

--Mark

[Hemoco]

Which is the frequency of lansweeper queries to AD?
Is there any way to modify this setting?

Lansweeper starts a full scan of all domaincontrollers every 15 minutes (this is hardcoded)
A workstation is scanned at maximum once every 8 hours (for active scanning)

[mgmzone]

Thanks for the response. I have am using our software deployment mechanism to push the following:

NETSH firewall set service type=remoteadmin mode=enable scope=all profile=all

Which so far has fixed the connection problems that I have been seeing. I am also pushing the lsclient.exe as a task, so I have it running in login scripts and via a taks to all logged in users, as well as Active Scanning. That should get everybody.

--Mark

[Hemoco]

- Should I remove lsclient.exe from the login script, or is a combination of lsclient.exe and active scanning a good solution?

Most people use both because lsclient keeps track of who logged on on which computer at what time.

- Active scanning has been running now for almost 3 days, and clients are still being identified. Does the process merely import from AD, or does it pull a list from AD and then attempt to communicate with the discovered machines?

Active scanning queries your domain controllers of all domains in the current forest and looks for recent logged on computers. It immediately adds the found computers to the scanning queue.
So the service does not tries to scan computers which are switched off for sure.

- Is the RPC error something I can expect to resolve itself? We have a GPO in place that turns on file/print sharing, and configures the XP firewall, so that shouldn't be an issue. 95% of our PC's are configured using standard desktop images, and users are prevented from making too many changes.

You should fix it, it's not going away from itself.
First try the connection tester to the affected machines and then try to pinpoint the problem.
99% of the problems are in the knowledgebase (most likely firewall/dns problems)

- I guess I am wondering if what will end up happening is my 3000 clients will be correctly identified and updated, and then the 2000 or so that are in AD but are no longer in production are goingn to show up as unavailable?

This is not correct, as explained: only computers that contact domain controllers will be scanned (which will be all turned on computers)

[andreag]

I think I'm in-topic making a question about it:

Lansweeper wrote:

Active scanning queries your domain controllers of all domains in the current forest and looks for recent logged on computers. It immediately adds the found computers to the scanning queue.
So the service does not tries to scan computers which are switched off for sure.

Which is the frequency of lansweeper queries to AD?
Is there any way to modify this setting?