Cleaning Up Unused Devices On the Mobility Server

Technical Note 2153

Last Reviewed 22-Sep-2005
Applies To
Mobility (all versions)
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Summary

When a Mobility client connects to a Mobility server for the first time, it will automatically register with the server and appear in the Mobility console; it will also use up one device license. It is possible to have old device registrations remain on your server indefinitely, unnecessarily depleting your total license count. This technical note discusses the circumstances that cause this to happen, the problems it can cause, and ways to prevent it and clean up old devices.

Background

Mobility licensing is based on your number of registered devices, not concurrent connections. On the Licensing page of the Mobility console, the Device Limit at the top indicates the number of devices the server pool is allowed to have. To see how many devices are registered, click the Devices button on the Client Settings page and check the value for Device count. When the Device count equals the Device Limit on the Licensing page, no more new devices can be added to the server.

You may end up with extra devices on your server that are no longer needed. There are two primary causes for this:

• A device is taken out of service

• A device is reimaged or the Mobility client is reinstalled (this applies only to devices running a version of Mobility that precedes 6.50).

Removing Unused Devices

If a device is no longer in service it should be removed from the Mobility console so that it no longer holds onto a device license.

First, it's a good idea to make sure the Mobility server isn't holding onto an open connection for that device. By default the server will wait forever (or until the server is rebooted) for an out-of-range device to return, and if the device was shut down when out of range, or the device crashed while connected, the server may still have the connection held open in an "unreachable" state. To kill the session:

1. In the Mobility console, select the Client Status page, then click next to Connections to view the list of all client connections.

2. Sort the list by name, and disconnect the retired device if it appears in the list as "unreachable"(obviously if it's reachable then the device really hasn't been retired yet). This doesn't yet free up the license yet, because the device is still registered—continue to the next step.

3. To remove the device registration from your Mobility server, select the Client Settings page in the Mobility Console, then click the Devices button.

4. Locate the unused device in the list, place a checkmark beside it and select Remove Devices.

Duplicate Devices

Prior to Mobility version 6.50, if the Mobility client was reinstalled on a device (for example, by reimaging the machine), that device would appear twice in the Mobility console (or more, depending on how many times it was reinstalled), and would take up an extra license. Thus you could end up with the Devices list on the Client Settings page showing multiple entries with the same machine name. In addition to using up extra licenses, this makes it difficult to configure the device because you can't easily tell which entry is the correct one for that device.

To clean up duplicate devices:

1. In the Mobility console, select the Client Settings page, then click the Devices button.

2. Sort the list by Device Name, and check for duplicate entries.

3. Use the Last Connect, Last Disconnect and Registered columns to figure out which are the old instances of that device.

4. Place a check by the old device instances and select Remove Devices.

Additional Information About Managing Devices

• Mobility 6.50 and above largely eliminates the duplicate device problem, because it uses hardware signatures on the machines to tell if it's the same hardware, even after a ghosted image. However, devices that are retired will still need to be manually removed from the console.

• As a system administrator, you may want to periodically check for old devices using the Devices list off of the Client Settings page. It's easy to sort by the Last Connect time and identify devices that haven't been used for a while, and you can delete them if they aren't needed. Keep in mind that you lose any custom settings associated with that device.

• The Timeout—Link Inactivity setting on the Client Settings page can be useful for automatically purging unreachable sessions. It won't remove device registrations from your pool, but it will ensure that devices that no longer exist won't hold onto any Virtual IP addresses or server resources indefinitely.

  The default value (0) is to never have the clients time out. To clean up devices overnight set it to 480 minutes (8 hours). Do not set the timeout too low or you may disconnect active clients that have simply roamed out of range under normal working conditions. This setting won't clean up sessions that existed before you made the setting change—it will take effect for each client the next time the client connects.

Related Information

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