The COMPUTER NAME property is still using the computer’s NetBIOS name, and with the expansion into the Cloud it’s becoming more and more of a problem. Any chance it can be “fixed” so that we actually get the full computer name?
I’ve been able to fake it with a new property that returns the HostName of each system (stripping off any domain information), but it’s going to become a more serious issue because most of our Cloud based systems have much longer names than the older NetBIOS based names we used to use.
It’s more of a functional problem now, and it’s getting to the C-Level folks, and I don’t have an answer for them.
This is more of a Windows OS/Cloud Provider problem imho than a BigFix one because the limitation is on Windows side (BIgFix agent doesn’t really care about the length of the Computer Name, it just reports exactly what the OS has - if you run echo %computername% or hostname, you’d get 100% what BigFix has). That said, it would be nice IF BigFix offers some ways to deal with it by maybe introducing external client setting to control what should be returned as “Computer Name” (i.e. cloud instance name, FQDN, etc).
@itsmpro92, I am not sure if Tim is referring to the same problem but we are seeing this on AWS Windows instances. The instance names for all instances (Windows + Linux) on those are something along the lines of ip-10-xxx-xxx-xxx.<ec2_region_domain> (Amazon EC2 instance hostname types) but because Windows can’t handle long computer names, so instead on OS-level they put some dummy representation of the above and give you the option to change it (documentation), so the Cloud Instance Name does NOT match the Computer Name; the same problem on Linux doesn’t exist because the OS doesn’t care about the length of the Computer name and they just populate the full instance name (and BigFix client just picks that up as is, just as it does on Windows). It just creates a data reporting problem - an owner that is not very technical and just stood up an Instance in the Public cloud might not even know that the machine has this other name and then look into BigFix and it’s hard to find their machine (obviously, you can find it by IP or instance id or something else but it is just not what you would tend to do naturally).
@ageorgiev I disagree with you here. It’s NOT a Windows OS/Cloud Provider issue.
It’s only a limit when you are using NetBIOS as a communications protocol. Once NetBIOS is out of the picture, the computer names can be much longer. We got rid of NetBIOS years ago and now rely on DNS which means we are no longer restricted to 15 character Computer Names. I first reported issues with the BigFix Computer Name a while back.
Without NetBIOS limiting the Computer Name to 15 Characters, you can use the limit of DNS which is 63 characters.
Again, it is NOT a WINDOWS issue unless you are limiting yourself by using the retired NetBIOS protocols. Remove it and the newer Windows OS’s use DNS for the same function and will very happily use longer computer names…
Are you saying that if you run the following commands in cmd on the box itself you get different response than what appears in BigFix? As far as I know, BigFix client is reporting exactly what the OS has as computer name. IF that is not the case I would open a support case as imho it would be a bug BUT if the OS itself can’t overcome the limitation and still shows them limited to 16 characters then it is an OS/Cloud Provider issue - the real “Computer Name” as far as the OS is just that thing limited to 16 characters and NOT the “DNS Name”! As I said, I would be all for a mechanism for BigFix to give us control the change things but this would purely an enhancement request and not a bug as BigFix client is doing exactly what it is supposed to…
This is what BigFix is reporting, and it is still what Windows will give you depending on how you ask it, so it is really the fact that Windows has 2 different internal names for the same computer that is the issue.
It does seem like the longer name is what should be reported in BigFix today, but it isn’t clear to me that it should have been that way always and this would be a pretty big change for anything that makes the assumption that it is reporting the truncated name, but with the fact that Cloud Plugins and MCM may report the name differently, it does make a good case to switch it.
I wouldn’t say what BigFix is reporting is “incorrect” just not ideal, but there wasn’t as strong of a case to switch it up until now.
That’s exactly what I meant too but I would go and say that blind switch shouldn’t be the case either as on the flip-side it may cause issues for other customers. For comparing it to Cloud Providers, yes, it does BUT if you are comparing to AD data where if not mistaken they continue to use NetBIOS names (i.e. you do not see names in AD that are 64 characters), this will cause the very same type of issue that this is meant to solve! Hence that some middle ground should be considered where it give the client control what they want to be “Computer Name” per machine (client setting).
Seems like we’ve identified a shortcoming in the computer name inspector. As it stands, the developer documentation is not sufficiently clear about how the value is derived on endpoint platforms.