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consolegroup INP setting does not dynamically update the clients group membership

Created: 30 Jan 2013 | 4 comments

On thin clients running windows 7 (specifically HP t5740e and t610):

After imaging I want to specify the group in the aclient.inp (I am using dagent so I know that I need InstallDir setting in there at the very least) file so that when a thin client gets re-imaged by my techs, the client automatically goes to the right group in DS (6.9 SP5)  Our clients get re-imaged quite often due to changing functions and "kiosk types" and it would be great if they could dynamically update the group they belong to. 

However, almost all of my thin client agents exist in the database already.  Modifying the aclient.inp ConsoleGroup setting, throwing it in the Dagent install directory and restarting the service does not update the client's group membership in DS.

Unless, I delete the client's account in DS.  Then and only then will the client's group membership take on the settings that I had in the ConsoleGroup setting (which I found is just a registry key that gets written on the client)

My question is, can I create a job based on a condition or what have you that can delete a client so that it then essentially self-updates?

If not,

Can I tell deagent somehow to force and update on its group membership?

Thank you for any suggestions. 

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BBC's picture

Not sure if this would be helpful for you, but what we do for specific clients (based on the naming convention we have) we move them into a spcific group using a SQL query that is scheduled to run using Windows Task Scheduler. Simply lookup the group ID in the eXpress DB and use that if you like.

CMD file to be called from the Windows task contains:
osql -E -n -i .\QUERY\Move_to_Group_12.sql -o .\LOG\Move_to_Group_12.log

SQL script contains:
Use express
UPDATE computer
SET group_id='12'
WHERE like 'VW-LAB%' AND computer.group_id IS NULL

Hope this helps at least a bit.

planecoIT's picture

Thanks BBC for the suggestion. 

how do you notify altiris to run the scheduled task?  Or is it something that runs periodically looking for the group "flag" in the client?

BBC's picture

It's a Windows task that runs on the Deployment Server. You create a Windows task (Server 2008 I believe it is called Windows Task Scheduler), which calls the CMD file (see previous reply for details) and schedule it to run every xx minutes or hours. As you could also see, I provided a SQL script, which is based on our needs, so you would have to change the WHERE statement to match your needs and you also need to lookup the group ID from your eXpress database.

Since this is a Windows task, there is nothing that is done to the DAgent or AClient on your target machines, but simply a Windows job that does the housekeeping for us on the DS console thru the backend.