July, 2005 CCS News: IT Maps the Future of Windows Workstations at Berkeley Lab: Automatic Inventory Collection

July, 2005

IT Maps the Future of Windows Workstations at Berkeley Lab:
Automatic Inventory Collection

The IT Division is working with our partners in Operations and Engineering to further develop the concept of automated inventory collection for Windows computers. This will assist with our workstation management processes but could also lead to significant improvement in the property management process (automatic verification of a computers location and user), thus avoiding the labor intensive audits we do now. In order to start the process, we need to record each computers DOE number in it's registry.

Benefits

The DOE number will be associated will other inventory data automatically acquired from each participating computer. This data will feed a new system, (CMS - Configuration Management System) that does not duplicate any existing Lab system or data store. Its real function is to tie the Network Equipment Tracking System (NETS), Asset Management Systems (AMS), and automatically collected inventory data together. In addition, CMS will provide a home for a few new data fields that the Workstation Standardization and Centralization Initiative needs to be successful.

As a side benefit, once we connect CMS with NETS, there is a strong possibility we will be able to propose the automation of the annual property audit, by using the data that is collected by various IT Division systems.

How it works

Users of Windows Domain accounts (as well as Novell users) will see the following message when they log on to their computers. This message will appear only once if a valid DOE number is entered.

This application prompts you for your DOE number, usually located on a small white sticker on the front of your computer. Please type in the DOE number and click [Next]. A screen shot of a typical DOE number is below for reference.

Next steps

The DOE number collection program (WriteDOE) will be run on all computers who are associated with the IT Divisions Novell Directory and Window Domains. The WriteDOE program will issue a one time prompt to enter the DOE number. The DOE number will then be written to the computers registry for later reference.

Start Date

August 4, 2005

Technical details

IT division has developed a small program that asks for a DOE number and will validate it against the AMS property database. If it can validate it, the number, time/date stamp and a flag that indicates success is written to a new set of registry keys. If the number can not be validated (either because the system that does the validation is not operational or because the user fails to type in the correct number three successive times, the attempt is recorded, but the verify flag is set to No. The process can then be run silently at a later point in time to validate the data automatically. If the root cause was due to a problem in the backend, the user is not asked to reenter it again. All of this has been tested, and we are confident in the process.