Synopsis

Inventory NDI files gathered from devices running MacOS where the inventory agent has been unable to identify a unique ID for the machine or user may fail to import.

Details

When the inventory agent is unable to identify a unique ID for the machine or user, inventory NDI files from the agent may fail to import. When this occurs the import process produces an error like the following:

Expected hex 0x in '{0}'.

File <C:\ProgramData\Flexera Software\Incoming\Inventories\username on machinename at 20201114T092438 (Full).ndi: File content was in invalid format

When inspecting the contents of affected NDI files you will see the MachineUID and/or the UserUID attribute values set to "{}" as follows:

<Inventory Tracker="16.0.1" Audience="machine" MachineUID="{}" UserUID="{}" ...>

Fix details

Two changes have been made which help to address this issue:

1. The MacOS agent has been changed to avoid generating NDI files that contain "{}" UID values and subsequently fail to be imported by older inventory servers due to this issue.
2. The inventory server has also been changed so it can successfully import NDI files generated by older MacOS agents that have "{}" UID values.

Workaround

This issue can be manually worked around by editing an affected NDI file to remove the "{}" values: 

<Inventory Tracker="16.0.1" Audience="machine" MachineUID="" UserUID="" ...>

After editing a file, import the file by placing it in the C:\ProgramData\Flexera Software\Incoming\Inventories directory on the inventory server, or uploading it again.

Fix status

This issue has been fixed in the following FlexNet Manager Suite releases: 2020 R2.3 / Apr 2021 (Cloud), 2021 R1 (On Premises)

Other information

Affected components: Agent, Inventory, Uploaded file importers

Master issue ID: IOJ-2179972

Also known as: FNML-72990