While the deployment we were assisting with today was maybe not that large even by local standards the issue was something that comes up on a some what regular basis.
A customer wants to have a number of Thin Clients imaged to their specifications and then drop-shipped to various locations ready to go. Part of this involves creating and applying Asset Tags to the devices – a small thing to be sure – but for the poor folks in charge of keeping track of the devices this was vital.
The issue was that part of the FBReseal (First Boot Reseal) process renames the devices based on a process that combines the MAC address and the serial number and then comes up with a random name, and of course that was not making things that easy for the “Asset Taggers” ;-)
So we were testing the imaging process at the Integrators site using Altiris as the deployment mechanism and trying to figure out how we might be able to achieve something that would leave everybody happy and we discovered “COMPNAME.EXE”
My hats off to Oli at Willowhayes.co.uk as this is a great tool that does exactly what we were after, but it clearly has some great functions that make it really well suited for RIS with references to UUID and the ability to create and reference fake UUID’s when needed.
It is so easy because you can easily see the info it can pull out via the summary switch (examples below) and then reference them via the template function – so in our specific case we simply called a job that ran “COMPNAME.EXE /c HP-?s” and this then appended the serial number after the HP- prefix.
Now it was possible for the customer to receive a spreadsheet of all the devices, including a listing of the specific Computer Names so that Asset Tags can be printed and applied ahead of delivery.
Summary switch provides the following info:
Mainboard manufacturer : Hewlett-Packard
model : 30C8
serial :
Chassis manufacturer : Hewlett-Packard
model : Notebook
serial : 2CEXXXXH29
System manufacturer : Hewlett-Packard
model : HP Compaq 2710p (#ABG)
serial : 2CE8060H29
Ethernet address : 00:1F:3B:09:XX:XX
IP address : 192.168.0.4
NetBIOS name : xxxxxxxxxxx
DNS Host name : xxxxxxxxxxx
System UUID : 21FFBB999ADCXXXX111XXX8410012529
Switch Examples are:
?u = System UUID ?U = Fake UUID (24 zeros plus MAC).
?G = If System UUID is FFFF... or 0000... or null it uses ?U, otherwise ?u.
?i, ?j, ?k, ?l = 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th octets of IP (decimal).
?I, ?J, ?K, ?L = 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th octets of IP (hex).
?d = Hostname found by reverse DNS lookup of IP address.
?m = First MAC address. ?e = Existing NetBIOS computer name.
?D = day ?M = month ?Y = year
?1, ?2, ?3, ..., ?0 = 1, 2, 3, ..., 10 random alphanumeric characters.
COMPNAME /c acme-?s Changes computer name to "acme-ABCDEF" where ABCDEF is the system serial number.