SMS: Customized Hardware Inventory .mif Files Are Placed in the Badmifs Folder (319167)

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256986 Description of the Microsoft Windows Registry

SYMPTOMS

After you customize the default Sms_def.mof file and change the reporting values to report more available properties for additional available inventory classes, the inventory .mif file that is generated may be larger than the site-defined maximum .mif file size. This .mif file is rejected by the Inventory Data Loader Server component. Any .mif files that are larger than this maximum size are placed in the SMS\Inboxes\Dataldr.box\Badmifs folder. An error message that is similar to the following message may be recorded in the Dataldr.log file:

Starting the No. 1 machine MIF processing thread, thread ID = 6C4
Processing file NPFPTHKY.MIF
ERROR: File size exceeds defined maximum.
Cannot process MIF NPFPTHKY.MIF, moving it to D:\SMS\inboxes\dataldr.box\BADMIFS\NPFPTHKY.MIF
Finished processing file NPFPTHKY.MIF
No more machine MIFs to be processed, terminating thread
Finished processing 1 MIFs

CAUSE

If you report additional inventory information in the Sms_def.mof file, the size of the inventory .mif file increases. By default, the maximum size of a hardware inventory .mif file is 5 megabytes (MB). (This is noted in decimal as 5000000.)

WORKAROUND

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You can specify the maximum size of a hardware inventory .mif file to increase the default maximum. To do this, change the following registry value:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\SMS\Components\SMS_INVENTORY_DATA_LOADER\Max MIF Size

The value that you specify is the number of bytes that the Data Loader component will process in a single mif file. You may want to specify the value in decimal instead of hexadecimal. For example, if you want to change the Max MIF Size registry value to 10 MB, enter a value of 10000000 (decimal). The default value is 5 MB.

MORE INFORMATION

The default Sms_def.mof file that is included with Systems Management Server (SMS) 2.0 produces a .mif file that is approximately 100 KB in size. If you report all of the attributes for all inventory classes, the .mif file that is produced varies in size depending on the information that is returned.

Subsequent hardware inventories are referred to as "Delta Inventories." These contain information only for workstations that have changed since the last hardware inventory. The default Delta .mif file size is approximately 6 KB with no changes.