I’m working tasks to migrate to TEM. Developing a script to identify devices that are in AD but not in TEM. I have the piece that pulls the name of devices from AD no problem. I’m using SOAP to run the folowing relevance to pull back all devices: names of bes computers. When I look in the console it says I have 1404 device. The relevance statement pulls back 1671 records with several duplicates. Some DMZ devices were duplicated almost 30 times. This shows that almost 16% of the devices are duplicates. I’ve been running the BESComputerRemover.exe command so I think these are being marked as deleted.
What does marked as deleted do?
Why are there so many duplicates?
Does having all of these duplicates impose additional overhead?
I know this isn’t your question, but you might find it easier to use the BigFix Client Deployment Tool to find assets that are in AD and missing the TEM client. The tool can querey your AD and then reports back if the endpoint has the client or not. You can then push the client out to those targets.
Anything that changes the computerID or the sequence number of a computer (stored in the registry on windows) will cause the computer to duplicate… So common things are if there are registries that are restored, VMs that are rolled back, or anything else that might change those values.
good points. Is there a name rule in Bigfix/TEM to help to identify computer? besides computerID or the sequence number, is there other information (such as MAC address, IP etc) used to avoid duplicate?
If there is a document to tell the rule to identify a computer, it is helpful to handle the problem. How do you think?
The ComputerID that is generated at first registration time is the only unique identifier. The BESComputerRemoverTool referenced in the post above lets you clean out the duplicates if you have any.
Actually, since you just replied on a 5 year old post, I’d say the design works pretty well. It even handles when there really are multiple computers with the same hostname (as I deal with).
Unfortunately it does not work well with provisioned Citrix servers. Every time a provisioned Citrix server is rebooted the COMPUTERID is recreated and you have a duplicate server in the console.