So there's this weird behavior in Apple Remote Desktop where computers will report self-assigned IPs back to the console before they've gotten their real IPs from the DHCP server, and then since ARD contacts computers based on this IP address, they become "lost," in a manner of speaking. I can fix this by wiping out the 169.x.x.x address from the computer's attributes, and then letting the console refresh it from the DNS name (which is still present and resolvable).
It's both tedious and semi-rarely occurring, but my thinking is that there's got to be a way to script a service that will do this for me. So far, I've created a service in Automator that receives selected computers as input and passes them to a Run AppleScript action, which looks like:
on run {input, parameters}
tell application "Remote Desktop"
set theComputers to input
repeat with x in theComputers
set Internet address of x to ""
end repeat
end tell
end run
However, this doesn't seem to have any effect whatsoever on the computers in Remote Desktop. I'm not particularly experienced with AppleScript, but my inkling is that setting the property of that object is not the same as making an edit to the actual computer listed in ARD. Does that mean this is more complicated than I think it should be? Any help is appreciated.