Inventory Heartbeat Problem
Basically PDQ Inventory is supposed to poll (heartbeat) every 300 seconds but it has been over an hour and the status of the machine is staying at OFFLINE. The machine is ONLINE so something is not working correctly.
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The most likely cause is name resolution. PDQ Inventory (in the current version) uses the fully qualified host name to do the heartbeat. See if you can ping the computer using its full host name. If that works, it may be a timeout issue. PDQ Inventory currently has a fixed heartbeat timeout of 1 second.
Damn, you guys do know your way around, hahaha. Anyway, you are correct. I was always pinging with the SHORT NAME which always works, because my machines are on the domain so it should always resolve both versions, but it seems the LONG NAME for this one particular machine is failing so now I have to figure out why.
I guess one possible "enhancement" is to try resolving against both SHORT and LONG name although this is good, since now I have to "fix" this problem which is my problem and not yours. Thanks and maybe add some form of "help hint" like you do with the other other DIAGNOSE links you provide.
:)
Version 2 of Inventory will use the short name if the long name doesn't resolve. We've had a few requests for it, and we've hesitated because short names usually resolve via NetBIOS instead of DNS, which can cause some issues. But we've determined that the issues are small enough, and certainly less common than issues with DNS.
True. Like I said, maybe in some form of "summary" you can show that is resolved via SHORT NAME and/or LONG NAME so we can check "errors" because now you helped me troubleshoot that LONG NAME problem. Ironically, NETBIOS was shut down here at my company because of too many virus and other problems, so SHORT NAME should have disappeared although it is still working so not sure if DNS is resolving SHORT NAME or someone still has a WINS server out there resolving.
:)
We'll update the documentation, thanks. NetBIOS is like the killer in one of those bad slasher movies, it just keeps coming back right when you thought it was gone for good!
I resolved my problem of the heartbeat showing offline by turning on Network Discovery and File sharing which are off by default on our servers.