I am in charge of keeping track of the Macs at the company I work for... We have around 200 desktop Macs (G4s & G5s) and a few XServes. I have been manually keeping track of where all the extra video cards, HDs, DVD Drives, etc are at any given time. Recently I thought of using Apple Remote Desktop to generate reports of all the computers on the network.
This involved creating a remote-only user on every box (I'm only testing on about 10 of the computers right now)
I then launched Remote Desktop and the scanner immediately found all the computers and most of them were running v2.0. I selected the computers and updated them all to 2.1 successfully using the Admin tool. I then ran the System overview report for all the machines. It took about a minute to get all the data back from the ten computers and everything looked great at first. But then I started actually looking at the data and there are many errors in it.
A few examples...
1. The SuperDrives in the G5s are not found, The one G5/1.6 with a combo drive was found just fine though. as were the CD burners in the G4/733s
2. Some of the computers reported that AppleTalk is on when it is off actually.
3. Under CPU Type two identical 1.6GHz G5s show up differently "PowerPC 970 (2.2)" and "Power Macintosh" Why is this? The first is correct, the 2nd is missing important info.
4. One of the G5s modem says it is the finnish model when the rest say North American. They were all purchased in the US.
5. The screen resolution is incorrect for 2 of the G5s (reporting 640x480 when actually 1024x768)
It would seem that with accuracy like this I will have to go back to manually keeping track of equipment moves. Has anyone else in a large workgroup had any of these type of issues with Apple Remote Desktop?
Thanks!
Top