Computer name and hostname

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1

I’m trying to understand the differences between the various types of computer name/hostname inspectors.

The default “Computer Name” property in the Console reports back the hostname output for UNIX and for Windows, the NETBIOS name (max 15 characters).

  1. How does that differ from the relevance “hostname” inspector? (for which i have created a new property in the Console called “hostname” with code of “hostname”.

  2. For WebReports Session Relevance, “name of BES Computer” would be the “Computer Name” and “hostname of bes computer” is the FQDN aka DNS name?

I’m trying to use a single property in the Console and WebReports that retrieves the computername (without the 15 character limit) and allows me to cut on any “.” so I can report back on the shortname. I have to do that because my reporting automation requires a shortname but often devices have a short name of their FQDN and aren’t able to be changed.

2

I added a property called Hostname, based on the Hostname - Unix property in the Network Information (UNIX) analysis. I then renamed a vm I use for testing.

The resulting value in the property does return a 16 character host name from a Window 10 OS.

 Computer Name in the OS:     VM-4567890123456
 Computer Name in BigFix:     VM-456789012345
 Hostname property in BigFix: VM-4567890123456

For my RHEL systems, I see the full, dot separated name under the hostname property.

3

Right, hostname in Windows has no character limitation like “computer name” does.

What I eneded up doing was modifying my custom "hostname Property to be:

(if (it contains ".") then (preceding text of first "." of it) else (it)) of hostname