List Archives

This forum is an archive of all posts to our mailing list over the past few years. The forum is set read only therefore to contribute you will need to join our list community. See more info about this here.

When subscribed to the list you should use your standard email client to send your posts to ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org.

List Archives

Unanswered Active Topics

Forums Search

Forums >ActiveDir Mail List Archive >List Archives

Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] [OT] Naming conventions

Prev Next

You are not authorized to post a reply.

Author

Messages

brian.cline@xxxx.yyy

05/24/2006 7:50 AM
Yeah, thankfully I don't have to guess nearly as much anymore. I got fed up about two years ago and wrote three things: a small background agent program that got pushed out via GPO to all our PCs, a service that ran on one of our servers, and a program for the admins to find PCs. The agent programs would start up and immediately report to this central server every time a user logged in, sending basic information about the PC (processor, ram, service tag, ip address, etc) as well as who was logged in there. The admin utility allowed us to see who was logged on at any given time, so if we were on a support call we could easily find the computer name and/or IP address within a few seconds to remote control into it. The agent programs would even report to said server when they were away from our internal network, which was interesting because we'd see some of our people with their laptops fired up at home at all hours of the night. Unfortunately I never had the time to really build up this suite of apps the way I really wanted to, so they still have their quirks. It also takes a while for all computers to install updated versions of the agent program via GPO, especially our sales laptops which are almost never physically connected to the internal network when they boot up. I do think that'd be a great idea to document a machine's service tag on each helpdesk ticket. I'm not sure I could convince my boss to name all computers with their service tags -- but someday I hope to find the time to write some DB integration into that server app so that the helpdesk system can get to that information. Someday... Brian -----Original Message----- From: ActiveDir-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ActiveDir-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of bonnie.pohlschneider@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Wednesday 24 May 2006 15:06 To: ActiveDir@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Naming conventions (quasi-OT) If you don't have the resources or time to change a computer name every time is changes departments, you could go with something static like a serial number or service tag number. It may not help you physically locate the PC, but you would be able to track machine history to determine if there was a trend of problems leading up to a hardware/software failure. By documenting the computer name on each Help Desk ticket, it gives an effective log of issues with a particular computer. One down side to this is that it's difficult to "guess" the machine name if you need to remote in and work on it. Bonnie ________________________________________ From: ActiveDir-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ActiveDir-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Brian Cline Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 1:35 PM To: ActiveDir@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ActiveDir] Naming conventions (quasi-OT) I'm curious to see how some of you (especially at the larger corporations) name your domain-joined computers. At my company we've got about 110 computers in roughly , and for the longest time they've been named after the logon name of the user who primarily operates the PC. (Not a fan of that method myself.) However, when naming or renaming a PC there are cases (such as preparing a replacement PC for a user) where there's already one with the desired name. Our network admin has a horrible habit of putting random numbers at the end when he runs into this problem, rather than using ADUC to remove a ghost computer object (or renaming the existing one when a new one is being prepared for said user). Of course this constantly frustrates me as I can never correctly guess a user's PC name when trying to remote control it during a support call. I've had several ideas in the past, the most favorable being naming them by location then department, then numbering them (for example, CHS-DISP-01 would represent the first dispatcher PC at our Charleston terminal), and automagically renaming the "My Computer" icon on the user's desktop at startup time to reflect the computer name. This way we'd never have to worry about renaming a computer when an employee is terminated, and when I've got a user on the phone I can simply ask them to read the computer name to me. But I was curious to see how you guys go about naming your PCs and how you deal with problems similar to this. -- Brian A. Cline Internet Applications Developer G&P Trucking Company, Inc. Direct: 803.936.8595 Toll Free: 800.922.1147 x8595 List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/

You are not authorized to post a reply.

Forums >ActiveDir Mail List Archive >List Archives > RE: [ActiveDir] [OT] Naming conventions

ActiveForums 3.7

Syndicate

Friends

List Archives

List Archives

Friends

Members

Articles

Related Links

Ads