Shannon,
From my previous post re Windows 2000 servers we did establish that the servers needed to be updated. However, with that system in it's current configuration I'm struggling to understand why some PCs are responding to polling and others aren't.
There are about 30 PCs on this network and only 12 are responding no matter what adjustments I make to the others. To my knowledge there shouldn't be anything distinguishing those that are responding from those that aren't. All are in the Active Directory and are running XP Pro at either SP2 or SP3. The Windows Firewall has been temporarily turned off on all PCs that I have regular access to (some are notebooks and are taken away each night).
Given our time differences an online meeting is not really feasible at this stage (unless I get desperate) but there must be something obvious that I am missing in the setup of the non responding PCs?????
The administrator account has full access rights to all PCs.

Following is the latest error in the Event Viewer.

Event Type: Information
Event Source: NetPoint
Event Category: None
Event ID: 0
Date:  21/04/2009
Time:  10:06:55 AM
User:  N/A
Computer: SQLSVR
Description:
Poll completed. 9 of 70 computer systems have been successfully polled in 6.91 minutes.

The previous entry is:-

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: NetPoint
Event Category: None
Event ID: 0
Date:  21/04/2009
Time:  10:06:55 AM
User:  N/A
Computer: SQLSVR
Description:
The NetPoint service issued a warning.

Cannot communicate with the WMI provider on the following 61 computer(s). Please ensure these computers are online and their winmgmt service is running.

[List removed but many are non existining PCs that need to be removed from the AD.]
[I have checked winmgmt on those that are online.]
[Surprisingly, some of the PCs in this list are ones that have been polled successfully.]

Your thoughts on this will be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Ron

Hi Ron,

Could you try the following on one of the XP systems?  They're similar to the steps from the Windows 2000 post.

1) Run TestWMI.vbs on one of the machine's that isn't being polled, but should be.  If this fails, we'll need to proceed by troubleshooting WMI.  If possible, run this script as the same user the NetPoint service is running as.
2) If this passes, run an on-demand poll against this machine. You can do this by going to the Configure page of the NetPoint web site.  Once the machine has been inventoried, check NetPoint for its inventory and check the Event Log for any errors.

Please let me know how this goes.

Shannon

Shannon,
Sorry for the delay. I am not at that location right now. I am running your tests remotely.

Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.7
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Successfully connected to WMI on TimM.

On demand poll completed:-

Nothing added to the NetPoint inventory.
And, unfortunately, there are no new entries in the Event Viewer on the server running the NetPoint Database or on the test PC.
However, on the PC that I am running the NetPoint web interface I have the following:-

Event Type: Error
Event Source: NetPoint
Event Category: None
Event ID: 0
Date:  21/04/2009
Time:  9:40:00 PM
User:  N/A
Computer: NAS
Description:
The NetPoint service encountered an error.

An unexpected problem occurred while trying to retrieve the next scheduled poll. The service will retry this every 5 minutes.

Exception type: Neutex.NetPoint.Service.PollScheduleException
Detailed exception message: An exception occurred while trying to get the next scheduled poll.
Source: NetPointService
Target site: Void b()
Stack trace:    at f.b()
   at f.i()

[Followed by...]

Event Type: Information
Event Source: NetPoint
Event Category: None
Event ID: 0
Date:  21/04/2009
Time:  9:45:00 PM
User:  N/A
Computer: NAS
Description:
The NetPoint service recovered from the last poll scheduling error.

Ron

 

 

The errors about the next scheduled poll are unrelated. These typically appear if there were problems communicating with the database server. NetPoint will retry a few times if this happens. The 2nd message shows it was able to re-establish communication with the database server.

I noticed NetPoint and SQL Server 2008 are installed on the same machine.  I'd recommend configuring SQL Server to only use TCP/IP for its communication and not shared memory.  Shared memory is known to be a bit unreliable. http://docs.neutex.net/default.aspx/Neutex.NetPoint/SettingUpYourDatabaseServer.html talks about how you can go about doing this.

Now that it appears the polling issues aren't specific to WMI, I'd like to try collect some debugging information from the NetPoint service. Let's configure the NetPoint service to give us more information about its on-demand polls and some tracing.  You can configure this as follows:

1. Open the NetPointService.exe.config file from <Program Files>\Neutex NetPoint\Service in Notepad.  Please back-up this file before modifying it.
2. Change the Poll.OnDemand.FullReport value to true. This will cause NetPoint to write its on-demand polling results to the Event Log.
3. Change the traceSwitch value to 1. This will cause NetPoint to write some debugging information about its progress to a file called NetPointService.log in the same directory.
4. Save the file.

Go ahead and clear out the Application portion of the Event Log and restart the NetPoint service. Run an on-demand poll against the machine from your previous post and once its done you'll see a message in the Event Log noting its results.

I'll need to look at some of this information to troubleshoot the issue further. Please export the Application Event Log and send it to support@neutex.net along with a copy of the NetPointService.log file. You can also revert to your backed up copy of NetPointService.exe.config after this is complete.

By the way, is there anything unique about this network? I'm assuming all the machines are on the same LAN with no routers or firewalls between them (besides Windows Firewall, which has already been turned off).

Thanks Shannon.

Both Shared Memory and TCP/IP are both already eanbled in SQL. Are you wanting me to disable Shared Memory? The setup instructions at the link you included above says to set both to "Enabled".

I am just producing the log files for you now.

Ron

No problem. Yeah, let's disable shared memory. I'm signing off for the night (it's pretty late here in Florida), but I'll check out the logs in the morning.

Yep. Looks like disabling the shared memory protocol in SQL did the trick. Now I just need to sort out the Firewall / Group Policy issues.

Many thanks for all of your time.

I am having the same problem, but when I disable Shared Memory and enable TCP/IP everything breaks. I can't connect to the database either with Netpoint or with SQL Server Management Studio Express.

I have to turn Shared Memory back on for anything to work. This is on SQL 2005 Express. With Shared Memory enabled Netpoint works fine, but only pulls up 5 devices. I've tested the WMI script and it works fine to the system I'm testing on. Any help would be Great. Thanks.

Can you follow the list of steps at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914277 and let me know if you still run into this issue? The KB article covers enabling TCP/IP, the SQL Browser Service, and configuring Windows Firewall.

Thanks Shannon. I'll look into this, but in the mean time it seems to have started working on it's own. It has hit another wall now however. I'm stuck at 111 devices found. I was wondering, I may need to just dig deeper into the documentation, but what are the requirements on the end point device side for Netpoint to pick them up?

1. Do they need to have Powershell?
2. I'm assuming with the Windows firewall up, that the devices can't be scanned?
3. PollMe.vbs, does that work with the Express version? I've run it multiple times on a client where the WMI script works fine on, but no luck with getting it to poll.

By the way, this is a great product. Thank you for you hard work. I will be looking into going Pro, just want to be able to sell this to my manager. Thanks for your help.

After following the Microsoft documentation it would seem that my SQL server is already configured for TCP/IP. Odd that it won't work when I set it to use only TCP/IP. Going to try TCP/IP and Named Pipes.

If NetPoint has any problems polling your systems, it will report this information to the Application Event Log. Let me know if you see anything in there that looks suspicious.

Your endpoints don't need PowerShell, the only thing they need is WMI (which is enabled by default in Windows 2000 and higher). NetPoint can still inventory your endpoints if they have Windows Firewall enabled, however you will need to enable the "Remote Management" exception in the Windows Firewall settings. You can do this via Control Panel for an individual endpoint or Group Policy for your entire domain.

PollMe.vbs relies on on-demand polling, which is only part of NetPoint Pro. Fortunately, some very attractive pricing was just rolled out so you can buy Pro for $249 with unlimited endpoints (this can change at anytime... normally Pro goes for $1.99+ per endpoint).