Just a heads up for anyone out there contemplating moving their OS from 2003 to 2008 to host a 7.6.03 AR Server. You may not be able to license the server on 2008 R2 due to an error in the snmp.exe program that ARS uses to "locate" the active NIC and MAC address for licensing. This is on Dell (ack) servers and may not apply to other hardware, but on ANY hardware our practice has been to locate the NIC #1 in the BIOS (of the 4 built in NICs - and that would also be the first MAC address in hex order) and register that MAC address in DNS and generate our ARS Server license key for that address. Note that Windows 2003 and 2008 don't always name the #1 NIC in the BIOS as the Lan#1 or the Adapter #1 - we have examples of NIC#1 being called LAN1 and Adapter1 by the OS, and others where it is LAN2 and Adapter2, and LAN3 and Adapter4; the latter two servers WERE supposed to become a licensed server group! It should not matter - we DISABLE all other NICs in the OS. Running ipconfig /all displays ONLY the NIC that we have set as active. BTW, disabling the NIC at the hardware level does not help, and on a *&^%$ Dell you can only disable them in pairs, and the error appears to occur within the first pair anyway.
When the machines are Windows Server 2003, the snmp.exe runs and displays ONLY the ACTIVE NIC, no matter what the OS has named it. There had never been a problem with licensing in 7.6.03 on Win 2003 during months of testing (you may recall that in 7.5 it was generating a random number and displaying it in the Licensing form, and you had to ignore it and use the MAC address from ipconfig /all). When we reinstalled the OS as 2008 R2, the same 7.6.03 snmp.exe now displays a whole slew of entries, and the first NIC entry listed is taken as the MAC address to be used for licensing; in 4 out of 5 servers, that is NOT NIC#1, and therefore is NOT the MAC address we registered in DNS, nor the one we generated ARS licenses for, nor the LAN connection that is active for the server. Support is just now starting to understand that there is a problem, so I have no idea what the resolution will be. Until then I am completely stalled (again); options are to go back to Windows Server 2003 since ARS 7.6.03 does not properly support 2008 R2; license the server against the NIC 7.6.03 wants to use, even though it is NOT the NIC the server uses for DNS and to connect to the network (bound to break some other BMC component), or completely re-work the server's registration in DNS, AD, etc. with whatever random MAC that ARS 7.6.03 is "selecting" with the snmp.exe utility even though it would NOT be the #1 NIC on the hardware.. in the BIOS. It's always something silly, isn't it? Christopher Strauss, Ph.D. Call Tracking Administration Manager University of North Texas Computing & IT Center http://itsm.unt.edu/ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"
