A couple feature requests/bugs

[Scott]

I have a couple feature requests and bugs that I would like to bring to your attention. I have already sent them through the feedback option within TNI, however I am not sure the messages are making their way to your servers due to our corperate firewall.

 

 

The first request being:

 

When searching an IP range, show progress.

 

We have a lot of systems that are on the other side of the world and connected to our network over VPN and a direct line, and the best method we have of scanning these systems at the moment is using an IP range. The issue is, how the network is set up on the other end, the range in which these addresses is quite large and it takes a LONG time to search every possible IP to see if a device exists. As far as what I can tell, TNI has no way of telling the progress of what IP it is currently looking at, and has no sort of progress we can check on. After a while when searching an IP range we stop seeing new devices pop up, but says it is still searching for quite some time. We have no way of telling whether the search is hanging somewhere for whatever reason, or there is simply no more devices past that point.

 

 

Display that it can't connect to TNI server if it can't check for updates

 

Similair to how I don't think we can get out to send feedback messages through the program, I currently can't get out to check for updates due to our corperate firewall. This IS a technical issue on our end, and we can work to get it resolved, however TNI simply states that there are no updates rather than that it can't connect to the server to check for updates. I have simply came to this site to redownload the trial again and re-installed it to apply the updates for now. But if it wasn't for me coming on to this site in order to check if other people were having some of the same issues we are having, I wouldn't even of known there was an update that we could download that did indeed fix a couple problems we were having.

 

 

Serial number and model number, manufacturer as common values in all reports

 

We have encountered a number of scenarios in the custom reports where it would be quite helpful to have the ability to use serials, model numbers, and the manufacturer of the scanned system to use as global fields that can be used for all the different types of reports, such as with software as the object of a report. We lease our systems here and return them and get new ones every 4 years, we however have a lot of expensive software that we wish to extract off the systems before we send them back, and use TNI to quickly find which systems have what software on them. The issue is, we have all the systems brought back up in IT offline just before they go back, and a lot of these systems are highly inconvenient, or in rare cases, impossible to set up and power up so we can find out the machine name or MAC address so we can then use the report. It would be MUCH easier if we could just create a custom report with the serial numbers of systems that have the specific software we are looking for installed on them, so we can get to them and get it off. The serial number is a unique identifier that is, in most cases, physically stamped onto all our systems from the manufacturer. We currently get around this by either A) creating a report with the asset as the object of the report and adding software as a field, or B) creating two different reports both with the machine name as the field and "stiching them together" within Excel. The first method is inconvenient because it can be so bloated for machines that have lots of software installed on them, and make it difficult to find what we are looking for specifically at a glance, and the second method is a few extra steps of work for us to manually create results that are almost there already. Neither of these are critical, however this is just one example of many cases where having the option to get the serial number (or better yet, model and manufacturer as well), on these kinds of reports.

 

 

License limit exceeded. By how much?

 

This last one is regards to the detail of that error message. It simply tells us that our license limit is exceeded. What it doesn't tell us is by how much. We are confident that we are within the number of systems on our network that our license allows for, and simply have a lot of information for devices that no longer exist (mostly due to active directory requiring some "spring cleaning"). If we could see by how many devices we exceed our limit by, it would help us get a clearer picture on whether or not we actually need to get a bigger license, or whether we just need to hold out until we can get our act into gear and get the records of these old systems of our network.

 

 

I am really happy with the software you guys have developped so far, and it has shaved quite a lot of time and effort on our end.

I Thank you for your time, and it would be nice to see some of these issues considered for a future update.

 

Scott.

[Scott]

Hi Zak,

 

Really apreciate the quick releases and updates you guys are pushing out. Your support is supperb. The program detected it couldn't get out and let me enter the proxy settings perfectly fine in this update, and I am able to connect to the server and see the release notes.

 

In my custom table reports, the system serial number field added to a software oriented report returns "Not Available" for the majority of our assets. Is it possible to request the ability to get the serial number from the processor instead?

 

I can confirm that at least Lenovo/IBM and Dell have the same serial numbers physically stamped on their chassis as they do for the processor.

[Support]

Hi Scott,

 

Do you see anything similar to the required serial number in "View details - Hardware - System details"?

If not, try the following: scan a computer which serial number you know for sure with the TNI previous version standalone scanner. It will generate an XML file with the scan results in the "Data" subfolder in the current location. Open it in Notepad and try to find the serial number. If you find it, let us know where exactly and send us this file by email. If not, unfortunately it won't be possible to bring up these serials.

[Scott]

Hi Zak,

 

The requested serial number can be found in:

Hardware > Bios Information > Serial Number

 

I already use it for asset focused table reports and found it to be quite accurate, with the obviouse exception of if a case had the motherboard switched out etc.

[Support]

Can you please send us a couple of INV files for such computers (support@softinventive.com)? Right-click them and choose "Show in Explorer" to find the files. It seems that more accurate serial number is located in another field than we expected it to (on many Dells we've seen the same number is specified in two different fields - BIOS S/N and chassis S/N, seems to be wrong assumption on our part).

[Scott]

Zak,

 

I sent that email off to you a couple days ago.

 

 

I have another question though. I've noticed we are getting a lot of false positives of computers TNI thinks are online. Does TNI ping the IP address of a machine to judge whether it is online or not? Or does it use the hostname or something else for computers that were added via hostname?

 

When I scan one of these questionable computers it thinks is online it scans fine, and then the entry disapeers and then I'm assuming replaces or merges with another TNI entry.

 

I know for a fact TNI is not scanning the computers it shows is scanning, because those are systems we physically have with us and are off the network being prepaired for lease returns. Computers on our network keep their IP address for 14 days before it becomes available to another system, so if it's trying to connect via the IP address, that IP may no longer be accurate.

 

Some systems it grabs from active directory it has never scanned, because those computers are no longer on our network, however TNI says they are online. It supposably scans those items fine, and then the entry is either deleted or moved into something else, and it still says that device has never been scanned. (Which is accurate, because it's never been on our network since we've had TNI).

 

 

In summery, the issue is TNI is showing it's scanning devices that it can't possibly be scanning, and that it thinks devices are online that are not.

 

I have "Resolve network names" checked off within the scanner options.

 

 

 

Is it safe to assume that all the actual scanned information is still accurate due to the fact they rely on the mac address?

[Support]

Hi Scott,

 

The serial numbers issue seems to be sorted now.

 

Does TNI ping the IP address of a machine to judge whether it is online or not? Or does it use the hostname or something else for computers that were added via hostname?

This depends on the "Static IP address" flag that you can see and edit on "Edit-Properties" page. Machines with static IP are pinged and scanned by their saved IP address, and for machines without this flag the network name is resolved to IP address first and this IP is used then.

 

The option "Resolve network names" is only used when scanning by IP addresses and only to show the names in the Scanner window. It does not influence anything else.

 

Please check if the described issues are related to the static IP flag and let us know.

 

Is it safe to assume that all the actual scanned information is still accurate due to the fact they rely on the mac address?

Yes, the program relies on MAC, UUID, serial number and asset tag. Even if a network card is changed, there are other 3 parameters (though serial number is only relevant for branded computers and asset tag is not filled most often). So in 99% of cases the same hardware merges into one asset. This even causes problems to some users wanting another hardware under the same network name (as it was in v.1.6, which we tried to avoid now).