BESRM 2010 losing clients and/or policy assignments

[Jon_Sumida]

I am running BESR 2010 with around 200 clients. Yesterday when viewing them in the BESRM, about 120 of them went from the staus of installed with a working backup policy assigned to clients showing up as not installed and no policies or the clients just don't show up at all in the computer list. I check physically on the machines and the BESR 2010 software is still installed, but will say in trial mode (since license policy isn't being applied) with no backup jobs.  The only thing I did yesterday was delete some old backup destinations. I followed the instructions in this knowledge base article:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH153587&key=53845&actp=LIST

Unfortunately it looks like this procedure suggested by Symantec deletes clients or the relationship between them and the BESRM. Now I have a bunch of PCs that aren't reporting it or think they are not installed and are not running their backups. Outside of restoring back to the previous day's image for the BESR server, how do I fix this? 

So far I've been able to get some PCs back by restarting the Altiris Agent and BESR services and reseting the agent via the Altiris Agent Task Status tab.  I've then had to go back into the policies I've created and re-add the clients to the right ones. This is a lot of work to re-do 100+ clients this way. Ultimately I have a feeling that I will have to do this for each client and that the removal of the backup destination associations procedure I did was the cause. If so, then what is a safer way of removing backup destinations?

[Markus_Koestler]

>Ultimately I have a feeling that I will have to do this for each client and that the removal of the backup destination associations procedure I did was the cause.

-->I think you're right.

[criley]

I've seen something similar before and it was just a simple case of waiting for each client machine to poll the management server and things started to sync up again. Have you just tried waiting for a few hours to see if this is the case for you?

[Jon_Sumida]

It's been 2 days now and 7 clients have reappeared (still missing 100+). But 3 of those I forced through by rebooting PC or stopping associated services. They don't come back to the policies though. I've created custom groups and those don't come back either. For example, I've used filters to create a group of all my Finance PCs. That saved filter/group is now empty (missing 6 machines).  This is ridiculous....Why does BESR 2010 hate me so much *sigh*

[Jon_Sumida]

Just rebooted another machine and it didn't work. Had to stop the Altiris service, then force a manual configuration update. I can tell it worked because the "Changed" time stamp updates this time. The machine is now no longer on trial version, so it's getting the license policy applied. But as I was afraid of, no backup policies are applied. Had to go into my policy and add the machine back. Grrrr.

[criley]

I think you should get a case open with support so that this can be investigated further. Perhaps the steps in that article need changing...