Windows computer name

[mattfausak]

Is it possible to have the computer name show up on the topology layout instead of the type of device it is (windows 2000 lan manager). It would make it easier to track an individual rather than having to drill down and find them.

[Michael Holloway]

Hi Matt,

We're looking at this one currently, I expect that we'll see this feature later in the trial.  Today TBA is receiving the computer name via SMB/Netbios, but isn't pushing it up to the portal.  In a future release we'll likely add a hostname information field and populate it with either the DNS reverse PTR record, or the SMB/Netbios name as a fallback.  This could then be used to populate the Display Name in the Topology/Inventory screen as a better choice than 'firmware' field that is used today.

-mike

[Brian Bergin]

You should not assume that small biz's will have Reverse zones.  Reverse zones are not required of Active Directory and even then only companies with AD will have a Forward zone of their LAN so a NetBIOS resolution is the only way to ensure you have the right name of the system (though you could use SNMP or WMI as well).

[Michael Holloway]

Brian, agreed.  We're looking at how we might set up an order of precedence for determining which discovered name to show automatically as the Display Name.  There might be a drop-down or other method of changing it, but we have to pick something the first time a device is discovered. 

I need to expand a bit on my previous statement.  Currently, we're thinking along the lines of choosing the PTR record if (and only if) the DNS server is on a local LAN IP, and the PTR record we would query is private RFC 1918 space.  Otherwise, we'd use in order: Netbios/SMB, Bonjour, UPnP, SNMP, then finally CDP as a last resort.

Does this sound reasonable?

-mike

[Brian Bergin]

My experience with SMBs tells me you're unlikely to be happy with PTR lookups.  I often go into a new customer where either no Reverse zone is setup, which I'm betting will be the most common, or one was setup and is populated by DHCP but no checks are ever done to confirm the entries are correct nor to purge old records so there can be 20 PTR records for one IP address as the DHCP server gives that IP out over and over to different devices.  I've had SMBs tell me that machines in DNS have been gone for years and that they didn't even know DNS was there!  Perhaps you could give the VAR the option to pick the method of name resolution?  Something where we rank the order in which it's done so in some instances where we know there's a functioning Reverse zone we can do that but in other cases we just do it by NetBIOS.

Also, is there no way you can implment WMI?  You can get tremendous amounts of information by using it.  In fact, since WMI is just MS's version of WBEM (Web-based Enterprise Management) I would think that might be the way to go and not by Bonjour or UPnP (both are often disabled as they serve little purpose in general day-to-day use).

[Michael Holloway]

It's likely that we can never get the name automatically to the best choice 100% of the time regardless of the order of precedence, unless we knew per-device ahead of time which order of precedence would achieve the desired result.  Best I believe we can do is to provide a way to switch between any of the discovered names, to easily correct the ones that the default order gets wrong.  Adding in user-selectable order of precedence is possible, but would you really use it?

Regarding WMI, I'm not familiar myself with it.  Just a quick google search shows that we would probably need cooperation from a gateway daemon installed on a windows machine in order to make use of it (TBA is a linux-based device).  This is a feature that will probably wind up being evaluated post-trial.  But asking for it now does get it on the marketing folk's list.

-mike

**Updated: 2010-04-06 17:21CST -

It looks like direct access to WMI from Linux is possible, wmi-client (wmic) is an example.

[Brian Bergin]

Remember, WMI is just MS's implemention of WEBM so I'm thinking it's the best way to do all of this.  All the major OSs have some form of WEBM in it today from Apple to Linux to UX and Solaris as well as Windows.  Perhaps it's the better way than Bonjour or SNMP given what you can do with it.  You'd have to be able to provide credentials to the TBA, but if you were to implement this you could do amazing things with the TBA for almost any OS.

http://www.dmtf.org/standards/wbem

[dcorley]

Mike, Marcos, Tesla engineering group in CA-AS has a WMI interface. May be worthwhile checing with that team to see what can be done with it hosted on TBA. Raja Banerjee or Dan Nakamura. I think there's un-discovered "gold" in WMI that we could use.

Dave