Deployment Solution

Appologies, this may be a very simple issue but Im pretty new to Deployment Server et al.

On our deployment server, no groups till recently were implemented. I want to move workstations into Dept groups. How do I do this short of manually selecting each PC and dragging/dropping?
PCs cannot be filtered by IP Address.
I have lists of Computer names for the various depts, can an import via text file...?
(computer names themselves do not indicate dept either).
I had thought about Importing the PCs (even though they are already present) and specifiying a Department in the text file. This however creates a Virtual machine of the same name.
Another idea was to edit a Console Filter manually, IF its parameters were saved to a file.
Computer name contains aaaa
or
Computer name contains bbbb
or
...


Any ideas??

When installing AClient you can specify a group with an .inp file. Other than that it would be drag and drop.

If you are comfortable with SQL, you could execute a sql statement to modify a computer's group_id attribute within the express database. It would be a lot easier if the computer naming could help identify department. If you only have a few groups and the amount of computers that need to be moved are small it may be easier to just use drag and drop. Just as an example, I used the sql statement below to move several computers at once in the express database to an "Engineering" computer group.

update computer
set group_id = '707'
where name like 'usenglab%'

You can find a list of your computer groups and their corresponding group_ids with this SQL statement
select group_id, name from computer_group

Since your computer names do not identify department it would have to be something more like this below. An easy way to format a list of computer names in Excel into the 'computer1', format is to use the concatenate function. With this function you can specify you want a ' at the beginning and a ', at the end of the computer name. Then just copy that formula down your list for all your computer names. Once you have them formatted properly you can copy and paste directly from Excel to your SQL query execution tool.

update computer
set group_id = '707'
where name in (
'computer1',
'computer2',
'computer3',
'computer4'
)

Thank you for the advice on using SQL, I can now easily move batches of machines at a time.

I have also modified the query so if you want to mirror your AD structure you can use the following :
To generate a list of the Group IDs from DS do this

osql -E -S SERVERNAME -d dsolution -Q "select group_id, name from computer_group" -o "C:\list.txt"

Replace SERVERNAME with the name of your server and dsolution with the name of your database. This generates a text file called list.txt on the C: drive which contains all the groups in DS with their ID listed next to them

To then assign machines to groups based on OU membership in Active Directory use the following

osql -E -S SERVERNAME -d dsolution -Q "update computer set group_id = '67' where msnet_domain_ou in ('sub_ou/sub_ou/main_ou')

Replace SERVERNAME with the name of your server and dsolution with the name of your database, get the group_id from the list you generated above and the OU structure by either looking at the properties of a client in the Deployment Solution console, or by studying your Active Directory structure.

This is using DS 6.9SP1 on Server 2003 with SQL 2005

Hope this helps some folks

[Nothing like bringing up an old thread]

Quick question - we have our SQL hosted on a different server from the DS Server.
OSQL.exe therefore isn't installed.

Any chance someone could advise on which files I need to copy across to the DS to allow SQL queries?

Regards,
Gerard