Altiris 7.0... vAsset information incorrect... shared guid issues
Hey All,
I'm hoping someone can help me get some thing corrected within my SMP 7.0 database.
First things first, I've discovered that the machine renaming process being used on most computers has been incorrect. This has resulted in a fair number of shared guids. At one point, a support engineer from Altiris provided us with a report for determining what machines have shared guids. I've gone through the machines on this report and run a /resetguid command on each of these.
However, our asset management/purchasing specialist is still seeing incorrect serial numbers for various machines that I have run a /resetguid and also done a reinstallation of the agent on (using aexagentutil.exe /clean and then reloading the agents).
The report she primarily uses depends upon the vAsset class for its information. If I look at each of these individual machine's serial number in Aex AC Identification.Hardware Serial Number, the serial numbers are correct. However, the serial numbers in vasset are either blank/nonexistent (more likely, the machine isn't in there) or it's the incorrect serial number (goes back to the shared guid issue). I believe multiple things feed vasset, so I assume there is some period of lag between when I run a resetguid on a machine and when it begins showing up properly in vasset, but it's been several days and only one of the machines is now displaying properly in the report that uses vasset.
Does anyone know of any way to "help" this along or if there are additional steps to help get vasset up to date?
I've re-worked our renaming task to include a resetguid now so hopefully this issue will not continue (and, ultimately, we're hoping to move toward a more static naming convention) but for the time being I'm trying to find a way to make the report used for asset management more accurate. I could just throw in the correct field, but this report is used for all asset types, not just machines with agents.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
Comments
There used to be a synchronize
asset w\ inventory function, but I don't have Asset installed currently. You could schedule it and\or run it ad-hoc. Not sure if it's still relevant, but it might be worth a shot.
It looks like it is!
More information on running it manually.
Jim Harings
HP Enterprise Services
1st Rule of Connect Club: Mark the post that helped you the most as a 'solution'. 2nd Rule of Connect Club:You must talk about Connect club.
The Asset tables don't
The Asset tables don't automatically update with the new inventory information. This process is handled by an Inventory to Asset Synch task which needs to be ran. The task is found @ Jobs And Tasks\System Jobs and Tasks\Service and Asset Management\CMDB.
So I looked at the task that
So I looked at the task that you mentioned. I see that it is scheduled to run every day. It has been running each day and indicates that is successfully completed. However, the data in vasset is still incorrect for the machines that I ran the resetguid on. Any idea why the sync task wouldn't actually sync the inventory data?
There is some information here
http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO7202
(and a linked article that is specific to 6.5, but may still help with your problem)
Jim Harings
HP Enterprise Services
1st Rule of Connect Club: Mark the post that helped you the most as a 'solution'. 2nd Rule of Connect Club:You must talk about Connect club.
Thanks, the howto article
Thanks, the howto article above is very helpful in laying out what tables are used for what and how and when they are updated. The response is much appreciated!
It looks like what basically is happening for some machines is that a resetguid will update the inventory information so that the serial number, etc. is correct if it was not before. However, since information may remain under that guid (if the machine is assigned the same guid?) in the asset table, it does not get re-written because the sync process won't overwrite existing information, just blank/null values.
Assuming that we find our inventory information to be more reliable than asset information with regards to computers with agents, what would the harm be in running a nightly or weekly SQL script that would take the serial #, model, etc. from the inventory table and force writing those values to the asset table? If a hard drive changes chassis, etc. we would want the new information to be reflected in the asset tables. Not sure why this isn't done out of the box or why Altiris assumes that the Asset table is the "golden/correct" information but it seems to me we would want to depend on the inventory to keep track of any potential changes with regard to a rename or things along those lines. If a resetguid won't fully populate everything through to the asset level necessarily, I'm not sure how great a solution that is for resolving the entirey of shared guid issues. Going in and manually fixing specific records, as was suggested in one of the linked articles, seems burdensome.
Any thoughts on this as a potential solution/supplemental solution for keeping information up-to-date?
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