Weekly location jobs

Back onto locations - actually it's also related to the WMI thing.

Today I am doing my regular location update activity. I have a couple of reports sent to my inbox on a Wednesday morning. One that details nodes with a value in the Grid Ref attribute but that don't have a relationship with a Location (room) CI.

I have another that looks rather similar but gives me the nodes with a serial number that do not have a relationship with a Location (room) CI and that do not have a value in the Grid Ref attribute.

Lastly, I have a bl00dy great big spreadsheet provided by the data centre team detailing the results of their continual audits. I then use a series of VLOOKUPs (and IFERRORs - I like IFERROR, it's tidier) to match by serial and then (if I really must) by label. I don't like matching by name to label as it is very unreliable but it does help now and then.

So I am matching records by serial numbers, which led me to the Wintel server not reporting its serial that i mentioned earlier. I wonder if it has had a new motherboard...?

I seem to have a number of Windows servers without serial numbers...

Which strikes me as a bit odd.

WMI discovery has usually been rather binary - either it works or it doesn't. Why it doesn't isn't usually that complicated either - either WMI needs rebuilding or access is compromised.

I shall have to go annoy a Windows sys admin and see if i can figure out what's gone on.