jperry933

We have an issue where altiris got accidently put into one of the UNIX builds and we have a set of machines with the same guid.

We deleted the /opt/altiris/notification/nsagent/etc/host.GUID off of one of the systems and have waited a day and the system still has not showed up in the database. Are we missing something?

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reedracer

Happened here, too.

1. You need to make a collection with the bad guid as a filter and when ever one of the boxes show up in that collection, delete the resource from Altiris and delete the /opt/altiris/notification/nsagent/etc/host.GUID file.
2. In order to get the server to send new data to the NS, you need to so a cleanbeforerun style inventory.
   
3. I suspect the Full Inventory job is somehow bad on our servers, so you might look there, too.
4. If a machine still does not show up, do a complete uninstall/reinstall

There are a few KB articles (kb.altiris.com) detailing Duplicate Guid and Client Removal steps.

jperry933

What does deleting the computer from the collection do? I would think if the system checked back in and saw the record in the database with the same name and domain, it would assign the same guid again (which is where deleting the recrod might help)... but if you deleted the guid on say, 20 machines at the same time... and left the record in the database 19 should get new guids and 1 would keep it. At least that is my thought.

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jperry933

How can you remotely tell a UNIX agent to refresh their policies remotely once the file is deleted? Deleting the file remotely is not an issue, but I would like have the system immediately check in the second the file is deleted so we can get a quick turn around.


Thanks!

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reedracer

Basically you want to ban that GUID so any machines with or getting an image containing the GUID have to get a new one. Dupe GUIDs are bad mojo and cause all kinds of problems. e.g. the inventory for any of the machines with the bad guid is an almagamation of all the machines that checked in with that GUID. On the flip side, any machine that received a new GUID thinks most of its hardware inventory is just fine and does not need to be sent up bacause it has not changed since the last HW inventory. Now you have machines with unreliable data and machines with incomplete data.

On the Windows side, I have any client that checks in with a Duped Guid run a reset GUID immediately. I'm just not as handy in Unix to do the same in UNIX.

If you are remoted in to remove the GUID, then run aex-refreshpolicies to get the new GUID.

jperry933

Thanks. Yeah, we used to have a duplicate guid issue a while back in windows and I could normally clear it up by just forcing the client to reset the guid, but I normally would nto need to delete the record in the database. I just had to make sure the client I was resetting was not the current "record holder" in the database at the moment because it would just get the same guid back again. So, I am very familiar with all the headaches that comes with duplicates.

I found the aex-refreshpolicies command on the kb article, but it is giving some errors and a new host.guid file is not generating... so I am going to take the reinstall route.

/opt/altiris/notification/nsagent/bin
# ./aex-refreshpolicies
WARNING! The Altiris Agent for UNIX and Linux is not running.

/opt/altiris/notification/nsagent/bin
# ps -eaf | grep aex
34076 1 0 Aug 14 - 0:01 aex-pluginmanager.bin -D
35444 38658 0 14:36:05 pts/1 0:00 grep aex
36656 34076 0 14:30:31 - 0:00 aex-pluginmanager -F -nm -nc

/opt/altiris/notification/nsagent/bin
# /etc/rc.altiris stop
Stopping Altiris Agent for UNIX and Linux: [ OK ]

/opt/altiris/notification/nsagent/bin
# /etc/rc.altiris start
Starting Altiris Agent for UNIX and Linux: [ OK ]

/opt/altiris/notification/nsagent/bin
# ./aex-refreshpolicies
WARNING! The Altiris Agent for UNIX and Linux is not running.

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reedracer

Yeah, I'd reinstall, too, that just looks painful

luisdg

You can also try the duplicate diagnostics utility provided by Altiris. I've been running it for quite some time now. https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=3848&p=1

Altiris also provides a SQL script to merge duplicate machines if you're running into that too.