Client Management Suite

I am somewhat dissappointed that I am posting this question again.  After several years of not being able to use our Mac Altiris clients we still have no solution.

Previous post:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/macs-getting-duplicate-guids

Basically when we install the agent on a MAC it looks at DNS and looks at the name of the computer that had its IP address before it did and uses its name and record in the system instead of its own name.  You can see it in the Manage - Computers view.  It lists the resource name and the FQDN as differnt computers.

We recently updated our environment to 7.6 HF2.  I was hoping that they would ahve finally fixed the duplicate GUID issue with the Mac.

I installed the agent on a MAC and it already has a duplicate GUID.  The Internal Serial number is blank.  I really wish this could be resolved.  Maybe it's time to get some money back for our unused licenses...

I hope someone out there has some fresh information or ideas.

Morning JAunmc,

So can you go into more detail how you guys are "naming" your mac's?  Particularly what process your using to rename your machines.  Reason I ask is we use to have people use third party tools and it would cause problems as not all utilities rename both Computer Name & Hostname.

We currently are on 7.5 SP1 HF5 with 20,000 OSX machines currently reporting to it and we don't seem to have this issue.  Now we don't have all sites up yet fully managing all of those machines but we've had the local tech's review the system's information for those machines and didn't hear it was pulling duplicate names for the same machine.

Hi, there are a few possible causes. Based on your comment about DNS, I'd refer you to this article on DNS scavenging: 

    www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO100988

I've seen this a few dozen times over the years. Macs look at the dhcp/dns "cache" rather than at the live data so it's important to keep the dns cache in sync with the live data. 

I'd also suggest that you run the following to ensure the name is set correctly on each mac: 

scutil --get HostName
scutil --get LocalHostName
scutil --get ComputerName

If these are all correct then it's doubtful there's a problem with the local mac client (non-altiris) configuration. If any are blank, you should set them. The "--set" option with a name will set the corresponding value: "scutil --set HostName mynewmac". 

Also, run 'aex-helper info' on these mac clients to identify matching/identical resource key names and values. If any resource key and its value match on two or more computers, they will be merged. 

This article shows more about the 'aex-helper info resource' command plus lists a few articles to help avoid and resolve issues with matching resource keys: 

    http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO98421

Let me know if you have further questions. 

dougj
Symantec

By any chance are you dual booting your Macintoshes with multiple OS's?