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FileWave Windows Network Sweeper

What

Occasionally FileWave clients (Windows devices) can have an issue that prevents them from communicating.  Typically this is related to misconfiguration, user intervention, or a previously failed upgrade.  This article and associated content gives you a tool and a process for identifying and hopefully remediating issues on remote clients.

When/Why

Periodically running this tool during peak "online" times is a good practice just to see if there are devices out there you don't know about.  Of equal, and similar, use is using a GPO to enforce device enrollment and check-in.  This article: Client Deployment via GPO gives an example of deploying a client via GPO, but a batch process can be used to perform other compliance checks. 

How

OK, I am convinced to give this a try, but how do I do it, and are there any pre-requisites?

Pre-Requisites:

  • Be logged into a system (or launch a powershell shell)  as a user that has rights to all devices...usually a domain admin
  • Devices you are trying to "catch" must be online, and on-network
  • Process assumes c$ shares are reachable and for device names to resolve, dynamic dns must be enabled
  • Know your FileWave server FQDN, and have a proper API token
  • Have downloaded and unzipped the following content:
Windows Network Sweeper
FileWave Download.png

For ease of instuction, PSTools is included in this download, but it can be downloaded directly at: PSTools download

Process Overview:

  • Create an inventory query of Windows devices you "haven't seen for a while".  I like "OS Type"=Windows, "Last Connected" within the last 30 days but not within the past 7 days.  (Both of those date ranges are arbitrary).

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  • Make sure the query output includes device name only (alternatively you can export IPs from the client view window, but I would not recommend using IP from an inventory query, as you are likely to get the wrong client devices in a DHCP environment:

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  • Export this report's data into the offline.txt file included in the zip file.  (View --> Export Current View is very helpful for this).  Remove the header line that has "Deice Name"
  • Run the first powershell to see if any devices are online. (They'll be written to a text file used by step 2)
  • If there are any devices "found", you can run the second powershell script to attempt to repair them.
  • This powershell will attempt to use PSExec to copy a batch file over to the client and run it (details of batch in overview video below)
  • The last PowerShell script is useful to double-check the devices that were "fixed", to see if they were so.  And then that leaves you with a list of devices for possible manual remediation.

Related Content

Digging Deeper

It is probably very helpful to see an overview and this process in motion, so video examples follow:

 

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