Inventory Serial / Asset Serial discrepancies

[Migration User]

I've identified a number of PCs and servers where the Inventory serials  from  Inv_AeX_HW_Serial_Number do not match the Asset serial number in vAsset or Inv_Serial_Number (among other fields).  In some cases, the inventory record (from what I gather to be the most recent) will overwrite the asset serial number (along with other information.)  In other cases, the discrepancy just stays as is.  The net result is loss of valid assets and report data errors.   

At the root of the problem are GUID issues associated with switching out PCs, etc.   Manually resetting the GUIDs is not practical and often doesn't work.

To fix this on an ongoing basis, I wrote a report based export that creates a file with the problem computers to subsequently import with all of the asset specific information that we want to maintain.  I reimport it adding the current date to the name and change the status to "Inactive" if showing as "Active".   From there, I am presently manually deleting the previous record (just exported) so that the Altiris creates another Asset record with the current Serial Number, previously showing only in Inv_AeX_HW_Serial_Number.

I would like to setup a means to automatically delete the old asset record as I now do manually after it is exported. but don't know how. That way I could have it automatically run every night, before the records are incorrectly overwritten and merged.

Any thoughts on the approach and solution to my last step would be appreciated.

[Migration User]

It seems easier to create a SQL DTS schedule task to replace the serial number record in Inv_Serial_Number by the value in Inv_AeX_HW_Serial_Number? Maybe I didn't get you clearly.

[Migration User]

That isn't an option available to me.   Besides, I'm being selective in what instances the overwrite is done, as well as  changing the status (to inactive) and modifying name in process so the old serial number is kept in some form within the imported record (the import of the export before the original record is deleted).  

My main question is how can I setup a job within Altiris I delete the old asset record (after having completed the export of it) as if I deleted manually within Altiris?

[sdmayhew]

Do you have a single server or dual? If you have a inventory  server doing all the discovery and then doing the nightly push. You can remove the serial number data class.

vAsset is usually your contract data and Inv_AeX_HW_Serial_Number is the real number in the BIOS. So if you do not use the serial number in Inv_AeX_HW_Serial_Number you will continue to have this problem. I created a seperate table at one point to make sure that my contract data did not get overwritten as my monthly leasing was dependant on the contract data not the inventory data

[Migration User]

Also if you don't want any of the vAsset data to be overwritten, try turn off the task "Inventory To Asset Synchronization".

If you are using 7.0
You can also setup multiples of this task to manage groups of assets that you want to include/exclude from the sync'ing.
Look under Jobs and Tasks.