Does anyone manage data for Computer CIs and relationships to IPs or MAC Addresses in AM/CMDB? Of Particular interest is whether you do this through discovery, flat file imports, or if your users are doing it manually in the tool.
I have a customer who reuses IPs and MACs - after one computer dies or goes in for repair, they take the Network Card from the old computer and put it in the replacement computer. Sometimes they just configure the network settings with the original IP and MAC addresses. They don't experience network issues and they do this because of certain requirements particular to their environment. They use the Hosted Access Point relationship type in the CMDB to describe the relationship between the Computer and Address, and they mainly report the swap of Addresses between computers in a spreadsheet to the Configuration management team after it happens. None of that is really an issue, so to speak. What does seem to be odd though is how cardinal (Hosted Access Point) relationships have to be processed in Remedy. Mainly you have to: 1) Import the relationships that need to be removed first, 2) Run Recon Identification and Merge 3) Purge the relationships that are Marked As Deleted = Yes, 4) Run another import that imports the new Computer to Address relationships 5) Turn around and run another Recon Identification and Merge. Non-cardinal relationships are mainly handled through steps 1 & 2. Not handling cardinal relationships by using steps 1-5 leads to a mess of data that is tedious to clean up and you still don't end up with the right data until you do all 5 steps. So my question is for anyone out there who might have gone through this, is this what you're doing? Have you found other ways to speed up the time involved with processing this kind of data? I personally think there are other ways for BMC to process cardinal relationships, but they are unwilling to look at it without an IDEA and enough interest - so... any interest or feedback? Thanks, Janie _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
