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March 6, 2018 at 8:00 AM

How do you use autoconnect rules?

For those using autoconnect rules in order to get devices into an Organization structure, how are you using these rules? In other words, what have you found are the best ones? Device Name, IP, ?

And for the future are there any missing you wish were added? IP Subnet, connector rules (assigned based on SIC connector used)?

This is just a discussion to get the creative juices flowing.

Thank you for any input.

GMSS
7 years ago
Hi All, We have over 690 sites to manage and want to be able to sort them by IP address range. SNOW seems to be rather lacking in this regard when it comes to adding an IP address range. Its rather concerning that with all of these sites being subnetted as /24 /25 /26/ /27, how are we supposed to define this in the auto-connect rules? It only allows you to enter numbers and use a percent sign. Is this just not overly complex for what should be a simply designed process? Someone please help, if I have to type out each IP address this is going to be minimum of 6 months of work, 24 hours a day at this rate...
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PaulatDfE
8 years ago
Hi Mark I am about to setup an organisation structure to split computers by function (production / Pre-Production / Test / Dev) and then use the autoconnect rules defining IP ranges that will put the computers in the right part of the organisation structure. There are a few exceptions to this, such as pre-production and test servers within the production IP range, so my thoughts are to deal with these exceptions manually – ie move them into the right part of the organisation manually. My question is – will the autoconnect rules override any manual movements and move these computers back to the original area? Thanks Paul
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- Community Manager (Flexera Software)
  8 years ago
  Hi Paul, This can be managed by disabling the auto-edit for these exceptions. Select these machines in the SLM portal and select "edit computers" in the top left corner, after this you can change the organization, once this is set, just make sure to check the box for "disable auto editing". Save and close. Your settings for these machines won't be affected by the Auto-Connect Rules using this functionality. Hope this helps. Best Regards, Burak
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Community Manager (Flexera Software)
8 years ago
Hi ? From my experiences in the field, I use to define the autoconnection rules based on (ordered by preference) Domain Site Name Hostname / IP address Registry Value A combination of Domain+SiteName+Hostname / IP address use to cover the most scenarios. In some customers, I've used registry keys for QA / Pre-Production environments, for example, but is close related with the computer naming policy. But, as I've mentioned, it depends on yours environment complexity. Sometimes, an export / update process to update the Org metadata could be required. Hope this helps. Best, Jorge
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- Portal User
  8 years ago
  Jorge, Thanks for the input. I have seen Domain in the list before but not sure how I could use it. We go to the sitecode level, for example, our HQ in Rye Brook, NY would fall into, Xylem/Americas/United States/USRRK1 (site/region/country/UN-LOCODE). Our PC/server naming convention is supposed to start with the sitecode, but if it doesn't we go to IP, since each site has its own IP range that helps most of the time. The problem is, the sites IP may be the 3rd or 4th in the list, since a lot of machines these days use or have more than one network adapter, LAN, WiFi, BlueTooth, VPN, etc. SNOW cannot pick the right one. You do mention registry, is there a specific registry entry that denotes the IP address for the network adapter?
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  - Community Manager (Flexera Software)
    8 years ago
    Hi ‌ I think you can find the nertwork interfaces in this registry path:[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces] But to be honest, I used the registry key rule to connect computers based on customer custom info. In the past, I use to work in Deployment process, where customer use SCCM / MDT. When they deploy the computers with the master image, they save some custom info in registry, like location, office, and more. You can take advantage of this info easely: Take a look of this post to know how to get registry values using the Snow Inventory Agent for Windows: https://community.snowsoftware.com/community/ProductHub/general-forums/blog/2018/03/29/how-to-collect-and-use-registry-values-in-slm-reports Hope this help. Best, Jorge
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Gigi Carlino (Flexera Software)
8 years ago
Very useful
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carolai
8 years ago
Hi Mark, For computers we use the site name in our autoconnect rules. I must say we grew a lot in the last years by acquiring companies. We have more than 150 companies. Most companies are still responsible for their own IT. So we have no common naming convention, no common AD or unique IP-adresses in the whole group. All our companies have an internal CompanyID. And we are using this in snowagent.config as sitename. Depending on this sitename the computer is autoallocated to the company in SLM. The headquarters here in Germany is responsible for around 15 companies. We deploy the Snow Agent to these computers by our Software distribution tool (DSM) and in this installation package we can define the company by computernames and insert the sitename in snowagent.config. All other companies get an msi-file that already includes the companies sitename in snowagent.config. Only in some less cases we wanted to have a subdepartment within one site for computers with a special IP range. But this caused conflicts with the parentcompany, because I had no possibility to exclude this IP-range for the parent with the same sitename. I missed the possibility to define "NOT" rules. We then solved this by creating a separate sitename. So in total, for us the sitename is the only good way to autoallocate the computers to an organization, but we need to take care that every computer has the correct sitename in its snowagent.config. For not inventoried devices, found by terminal server usage, I found no acceptable autoconnect rule. For these devices we are using a custom procedure in the DUJ, that assigns a device to the company, depending on the used terminal server.
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harry.mansell
8 years ago
Morning Mark, We are a Shared IT service across Three Borough Councils, so we use Device Name for Autoconnect which works for us. If we were bigger then i guess we would look at the route that ? has taken. Kind Regards Harry
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Portal User
6 years ago
Any ideas about an autoconnection rule by operative system?
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