Hardware Inventory data files larger than 50MB may fail to process on a ConfigMgr 2007 site server

Source: Microsoft Support

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When attempting to process a full or delta hardware inventory (.MIF) file, a message similar to the following may be recorded in the dataldr.log file on the System Center Configuration Manager 2007 site server:

Cannot process MIF [xxxxxxxx].mif, moving it to C:\SMS\Inboxes\...\BADMIFS

Where [xxxxxxxx] represents a random alpahnumeric string.

There are no additional errors recorded before or after this message.

This issue can occur when a MIF file larger than approximately 50MB is received at the site server. Under normal circumstances a MIF file larger than 5MB would be rejected, however that 5MB value can be changed via the following registry key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\SMS\Components\SMS_INVENTORY_DATA_LOADER
Name: Max MIF Size (REG_DWORD)
Data: Size in bytes. Default is 5000000 (~5MB)

At the time of this article, the upper limit for that value is 50MB. Anything larger than that will result in the log entries noted at the beginning of this article.

The overall processing speed of very large (>5MB) MIF files may be unacceptable in many situations. Files of this size are not recommended as they can lead to backlogs of incoming data to be processed, as well as cause other performance degradation issues, such as slowing down the deletion of aged inventory records. Analysis of the individual MIF files should be performed to determine which class(es) are contributing to the overall MIF size.

Reporting for those classes should then be disabled in the SMS_DEF.MOF file.

For information on how to disable these classes, see the Configuring Configuration Manager Client Local Policy topic at the following Microsoft MSDN Web site:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc146756.aspx (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc146756.aspx)

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