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Hello, Spiceworks Community! I’m working with a university group right now trying to implement Spiceworks in a local company for a class project. None of us have any notable experience with networks, but we’ve been working with the network admin at the company and trying to figure this out.

So here’s the deal. We are experiencing scan errors with several machines in the local branch and satellite branches. Here’s what we’ve tried:

-We’ve changed group policy to enable remote administrator access.

-We’ve tried opening all the ports listed in the community documentation.

-We’ve tried shutting down the firewall altogether remotely from individual machines, which remedied the scan error but we’re not entirely convinced that it’s actually working when the firewall is back up (despite the absence of any further scan errors).

-The network admin at the company has modified the WMI settings per the community documentation.

We can ping all the machines on the network–and about half the machines show up and scan just fine. But we’ve done about everything that we know how to get the other machines to scan–and we feel like we’re at an impasse.

We were wondering if anyone has any further suggestions. The program works great on the computers we can actually scan–but it’s not really a viable solution until we can scan the other machines! We can shut down the firewall branch by branch over weekends, but will machines giving us scan errors which we scan successfully with the firewall down continue to work when the firewall is back up?

Thanks in advance for any help!

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Hi James,

Looks like you have come pretty far already!

If you go from not scannable to scannable simply by taking the remote firewall down, then you will lose the ability to scan when the firewall goes back on at some later time.

The easiest and fastest way to test Windows devices for scan-ability is to try to pull information from the remote device using a WMIC (WMI command). Spiceworks uses WMI as well, so if a WMIC returns proper results, Spiceworks should also be able to scan the remote device.

Try out the WMIC in this documentation:

[http://community.spiceworks.com/help/Why_Do_I_Have_So_Many_Unknown_Devices%3F]

Because you have already tried many of the common solutions send us your log files, and we can take a closer look at why the scan is failing to inventory specific devices.

Before sending us the logs run a network scan on the devices in question with the following configuration changed:

Settings → Network Scan

  • Incremental Scanning → disabled
  • Scan Speed → Slow
  • (Show Additional Settings) → Verbose scan logging → true

With these settings in place begin a network scan, and then send us your log files .

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Great! We will run a new scan and pick up some log files next time we meet with the client!