Retired computers don't automatically change back to active

Problem/Symptoms
	Retired computers do not become active again after sending Inventory to the Notification Server. This causes problems for scenarios in which the server is automatically retiring computers that have not reported inventory in a specified time period (specified under Purging Maintenance) while some of the computers are still managed computers that have been offline for the specified time period.

Cause

The cause of the problem is that the Notification Server discards almost all event data from retired computers. It was not designed to reactivate retired computers when inventory is received but instead discards the inventory event. On a retired computer, when opening up the client UI, go to About > Altiris Agent Details, and click the Send Basic Inventory button. Notice that the Basic Inventory Last Sent time will never change. This is because the client never received any acknowledgement from the server that the inventory was received (because it was discarded).

Resolution

The only events sent by the Altiris Agent that are received by the server are the AeX Client LogOn events. These are sent to the server whenever a user logs on or off the computer. To aid in identifying these computers download the report that will show retired computers that have sent event data for the specified data class (default to AeX Client LogOn) within the last n time units (for example, 30 days, 45 minutes, 6 hours, etc.). Select multiple computers from the report results, right-click on them and change their status back to Active. This process can be automated by creating a Notification Policy. See article 16909. You can use the query shown below. It reports any retired computer that has sent a client logon event in the past 24 hours. select distinct _resourceguid from evt_aex_client_logon ac join resourceassociation ra on ac._resourceguid = ra.parentresourceguid where ra.resourceassociationtypeguid like '%3028166f%' and ra.childresourceguid like '%492c463b%' and datediff(hh, ac._eventtime, getdate())< 24