Some may have noticed that any Macintosh computer name containing an apostrophe is listed incorrectly in Resource Manager.

This is actually a function of the Mac OS X operating system. It creates a hostname from the name specified in System Preferences/Sharing by removing apostrophes and changing spaces to dashes. See the following chart for more information.

Mac client – System Preferences/sharing computer name:   Douglas Jenkins’s Mac Pro
Mac client - results of ‘hostname’ command:              douglas-jenkinss-mac-pro.local
Mac client – prompt label:                               douglas-jenkinss-mac-pro

Altiris Table – inv_aex_ac_identification.name:          Douglas Jenkins’s Mac Pro
Altiris Table – inv_aex_ac_tcpip.hostname:               douglas-jenkinss-mac-pro

Resource Manager – Resource Name (and IE Title Bar):     Douglas Jenkins’s Mac Pro
Resource Manager – Fully Qualified...

In the July 25th, 2009 CompTIA SmartBrief newsletter [comptia@smartbrief.com]was the following blub:

       Data centers the next target for RFID
       RFID technology is seen by many in the financial services industry as a solution
       for Sarbanes-Oxley regulatory compliance, allowing firms to accurately and easily
       keep tabs on assets, and a group called the Financial Services Tech Consortium 
        has been assembled to develop standards for RFID-based IT asset tracking. 
        According to the group, the technology has helped Bank of America trim its time
        spent on inventory by 90%, followed by Wells Fargo and Chase at about 78% each. 
 ...

Recently, I encountered a Application Metering problem, which was evidenced by constantly seeing the following three errors in the Altiris log files.

Error 1: Priority: 2

Date: 6/23/2009 12:41:41 PM

Tick Count: 11234656

Host Name: xxxxxxxxxx

Process: aexsvc.exe (480)

Thread ID: 572

Module: AltirisNativeHelper.dll

Source: LicenseManager::RequestLicense

Description: The specified resource failed to obtain a license (Resource: XXXXXXXXXX, Product Application Metering Solution Configuration, Exception: Failed to load inventory. [Cannot insert the value NULL into column '_ResourceGuid', table 'custom_table_name'; column does not allow nulls. INSERT fails.

The statement has been terminated.], Exception Type: Altiris.NS.Exceptions.AeXException )

Error 2:  Priority: 1

Date: 6/23/2009 12:43:10 PM

Tick Count: 11324234

Host Name: XXXXXXXXX

Process: aexsvc.exe (480)...

Apart from Symantec products and processes, why can not we have ideas that can change the way we do things.

I have got an idea here that is going to save lot of time and money for our organization.

According to Microsoft the design goals for Windows XP on a typical consumer PC are:

• Boot to a useable state in a total of 30 seconds
• Resume from Hibernate (S4) in a total of 20 seconds
• Resume from Standby (S3) in a total of 5 seconds

I work for an organization which has over 1000 employees. Most of the employees are complaining about the time that a laptop/desktop is taking to boot to Windows. We are also concerned on the same. We had a meeting today and discussed about the new and ongoing issues in our company that are affecting the business. One of our discussion topics is, how to bring down the bootime and how to increase the performance?

We have a standard Environment:

• Laptop/Desktop [Dell/HP]:
• ...