Deployment Solution

Have some issues with DS 6.9 SP5, which may or may not be related to Windows 7. We have about twenty deployment servers currently, which each handle between 200 and 700 computers. Since moving to Windows 7 on most (but not all) end systems, some of the systems will display as inactive (grey computer) in the DS console, but they're still online. If you reinstall the agent remotely, they will be online again, for a time. If you remote into the systems and change the server information and set it back again, it'll reconnect and be active again.

It seems like this should somehow be related to settings in the Altiris Deployment Server Options... The general settings are currently set as follows:
Update inventory on active computers every 24 hours.
Update active client connections every 8 hours, timeout after 60 seconds.
Reset inactive client connections every 2 hours.
Do not encrypt communications between IIS and Data Manager.
Send Wake-On-LAN to inactive computers when scheduling, retrying every 60 minutes.

Clients are set to refresh connection after idle for 8 hours. In some cases, they're set to refresh after 2 hours, or not at all. In all 3 cases, some are connected to the server and some are not.

If someone has a silver bullet for this, that would reduce a lot of frustration for us. Thanks!

Possible that this is actually fixed by DS 6.9 SP5 MR1 (build 496 instead of the 490 of SP5), based on other people's articles.

http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/dagents-falling-network

My read of the first is that the problem is due to a MS security update that's included in Win7 SP1 by default. The 'fix' in base Win7 is to remove the security update, but if you're on SP1 already, that won't work.

http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/ds-69-official-support-windows-7-sp1

First thing that jumped to mind is that the NIC driver is going to sleep.  Go to the Device Driver Properties and take a look at the Power Management Tab.  Uncheck "Allow the Computer to turn off this device to save power."

Check the "Refresh Connection after idle"

What this setting does, is it will disconnect the AClient after the set period and then reconnect it to the DS again, thus proving that the DS is still functional.

If you you wish to have the AClients remain always connected to the DS, then you simply do not enable this option.  What this means is however, that even if the DS goes down, the AClient will always stay blue client side, making the User believe that the DS is still up.

I tested this yesterday in my lab.   all of my machines have been configured to refresh their connections every hour, so I disabled this option on one of them.  I then shutdown my DS for a couple of hours.  What I saw was that all of my machines that were configured with a refresh setting, stayed blue client side until they tried to refresh their connection.  As the DS was down, they could not reconnect to it after disconnecting.  The machine that did not have this option enabled, remained with a blue "active" AClient.