The Device Summary Page shows the Original Serial Number for a Device when it first registered.
Over time, this value will change due to many simple events such as Mother Board replacement.

However, the value in "zDevice" cannot be updated in either a manageable or documented manner.
Only the value in the Inventory Table is correct over time and leads to confusion with one value displayed on the device summary page and a totally different value shown in inventory.

One Simple Solution would be to have the device summary page show both the "Original Serial Number" value (zdevice table) and the "Current Serial Number" inventory table.

A second solution would be to allow the value of 'zDevice' to be update.
This can be done by manually edit a config.xml file on each and every primary, but this is clearly difficult to manage and when there are many primaries in a zone, manually updating config settings that much remain consistent across many servers is not a real-world solution. Further, this method is not even officially documented, causing suppport concerns if actually used...which is why how is not even referenced here.......

by: craig w. | over a year ago | ZENworks Control Center

Comments

• I'm not sure I would want zDevice to be automatically updated, which is what changing the config.xml implies, and I agree that keeping the file consistent across many primaries would be problematic. I'm looking for something simpler - the ability to manually update the zDevice entry for an individual workstation or server object. Our problem is not that the actual serial number on the object has actually changed - it's that due to some quirk in registering the PC, we actually have two entries for the same device, one with the "real" serial number, usually a "lost" device, and a current one with a GUID in place of a legit serial number. In those cases, I would like to delete the "lost" device and put the actual serial number in the zDevice table for the "live" one.

  by: Darcy C. | over a year ago

• Hi Craig, so possible workaround for you based from this TID - https://www.novell.com/support/kb/doc.php?id=7014394
  
  So just need a process to either re-image post hardware replacement or re-register the device with this option enabled.
  Hope that helps
  Thanks
  Spencer

  by: Spencer C. | over a year ago