IBM Machines reporting as unknown

[Smedl1k]

I currently run systemhound on an estate of 658 IBM machines.  Of these 380 return an Unknown value for Manufacturer and model type.  They also return an unknown value SMBIOS and memory usage.

The machines returning unknown are both laptops and desktops making it very difficult to audit on simple things like number of laptops versus desktops.

Any ideas of how I could correct this?

[Nish]

can you try this on  a couple of machines and post back if it works?

http://www.systemhound.net/community/index.php/topic,138.0.html

[Smedl1k]

Nish

I tried this the other day and couldn't get it to work.  I will give it another try though.  

K

[Smedl1k]

Nish

I have now got it working  

But does this mean that I will have to perform this on all 380 machines?

K

[Nish]

let me get back to you on that....tell me, do you use login scripts?

[Smedl1k]

We do use login scripts, but I did not use login scripts to install as the machines are all NT/2000 or XP.  I used the install wizard.

Cheers

K

[Nish]

You will need to get that change out to all machines, but you can do it via login scripts. Put this in notepad and save it as smbios.reg or similar:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\systemhound\pbplugin]
"SMBIOS"=dword:00000000

then call the file from your script.

As this will go to all machines, you may want to test on a machine which has been reporting fine, to see what the change will be. Or maybe you can use Active Directory policies to selectively implement this reg change?

We will address this issue in a future release; WMI can use alternative ways to identify the hardware, so not sure why its not doing it.