Troubleshooting client Installations or They’re discovered, why aren’t they clients?

A.Stokes

Something that I’ve seen quite a lot of in SMS are
computers that have been discovered and assigned to a site, yet never become
clients.

Something that I’ve seen quite a lot of in SMS are computers that have been discovered and assigned to a site, yet never become clients.

There
are plenty of reasons why a computer would never become a client. 
Here are some of the ones that took a little bit of thinking about before
I got them solved: 

        
1.   
Windows 95/98 and Windows NT machines were being discovered, but the
windows 95/98 machines were never becoming clients.   
A permissions problem with the scripts was preventing the users from
running the SMSLS.bat.
The Windows NT machines became clients because I had set up the Remote
Client Installation to install all NT servers and workstations. 
The whole logon directory on the logon points did not have execute
permissions set for normal users. After setting the correct permissions, I had a
flood of 110 Windows 95/98 clients installed in one day.

2.     
Machines seemed to be taking a long time to install the client. The
machines could be pinged, and the users showed active connections to the BDCs,
so I knew that the machines were on the network. Why werent they being
loaded? Turns out the clients were staying logged on 24×7, so they weren’t
running the script. After a few days of forced reboots, the machines started
showing up as clients in the database.

3.      
Machines were showing up twice in the database as assigned to a site, one
would be a client, the other wouldn’t be.This
problem stemmed from having set up DHCP reservations for each client. Sometimes
NICs go bad and are replaced, when that happens the DHCP reservation is no good
as it is MAC address based. SO, what was happening was SMS was discovering both
the active lease and the reservation and treating each one as a separate machine.
After doing some much-needed house cleaning on our DHCP leases, everything that
showed up in the SMS database was actually an active machine.