Wednesday 15 December 2010

ARD Client not working

I've had a problem with about 20 apple macs refusing to work with Apple Remote Desktop. They would screen share but I could not get ARD admin to connect to ARD client on these machines. I tried many things including:
  • Reinstalling ARD Client 3.3.2
  • PR reset
  • Disk Permissions
  • OS X 10.5.8 update

Only on re-imaging the machine would the computer comumicate with ARD admin.

I had the chance yesturday to sit down at one of these computers and work out what was wrong. Restarting the services was the first port of call. I then moved on to the "Console". This showed an ARD error message about "/Library/Application\ Support/Apple/Remote\ Desktop/Client/Tasks/..../OS X 10.5.8/.....plist not a directory. I thought this would be related to the Task Server as I did send this update to all computers. I stopped the task server but the error kept coming up. When I stopped ArD client the error stopped. I decided to rename the directory (which was owned by root) using the below command:


su root
password ..................
mv /Library/Application\ Support/Apple/Remote\ Desktop/Client/Tasks /Library/Application\ Support/Apple/Remote\ Desktop/Client/old_Tasks

Yay! It worked. Probably a permissions problem with that folder which was created during the update. I noticed that the ARD icon at the top turned from gray to black. On ARD admin I had to re-type the password for the particular mac (but I could have restarted ARD which would have refreshed it). This fixed all other computers. Only bad thing was that I had to go around these computers personally because ARD wasn't working on them. Oh well, it did give me a chance to check all the computer suites.

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