Inventory Monitors and serial numbers

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Inventory Monitors and serial numbers

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All Forums >> [Management Products] >> System Center Products >> System Center Configuration Manager >> Inventory Monitors and serial numbers

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Inventory Monitors and serial numbers - 7/29/2008 3:36:06 PM 1 votes

MhermanNBME

Posts: 78
Score: 3
Joined: 4/4/2007
Status: offline

I know there is monsernum.vbs out there, but it wasn't working for me, so I found a script that was working, and adapted it to inventorying and sccm, so I figured I'd share it.

I started with this script that seemed to work pretty well:
http://cwashington.netreach.net/depo/view.asp?Index=1087

I edited it to to be sccm friendly (it's attached). Here is the section to look at first, right after all the beggining comments (i left the orginal author's comments in).
------
'here are the variables for dumping to the registry
Dim blnRegDump,strRegDumpLoc
blnRegDump=1
strRegDumpLoc="SOFTWARE\Tools\MonitorInfo\" 'must have trailing \
Const REGDUMPHIVE=&H80000002 'hklm
----
blnRegDump will determin where the information is sent, 1- goes into the registry, anything else will echo it.
strRegDumpLoc specifies what registry key will go to, note if you change that, you will have to change the mof file.
The structure will be like this
HKEY\strRegDumpLoc\MonitorSerialNumber, with all the details as string values.

Once that was ready, I created the mof edits (also attached). Pretty self explainitory, using the dynamic reg provider.

Then I put it on my server, and checked WMI, everything looked good. Pushed the script the the clients, then hardware inventory, and everything is working well. I ran mofcomp on all the clients, since I already had the system setup, but i don't think you need to anymore with sccm2007. You have to give it some time for the first to show up, then they'll start pouring in.

Here are some notes:
Not all monitors report EDID information.
If it doesn't find a serial number, it doesn't report anything.
I'm not sure how dual monitors will report.
It's possible to report a past monitor as well as or instead of the current monitor.
If the computer was turned on before the monitor, the script will not be able to get the edid.
With KVM’s the pc needs the focus during the bootup.

If you changed the reg path in the script, make sure you change the path in the mof edits
[ dynamic, provider("RegProv"),ClassContext("local|HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Tools\\MonitorInfo")]

I know the script could be cleaned up and reworked a lot, but it works, and should be fairly easy to debug still.

Good luck.

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Post #: 1

RE: Inventory Monitors and serial numbers - 7/29/2008 5:18:57 PM

skissinger

Posts: 2293
Score: 145
Joined: 9/13/2001
From: Sherry Kissinger
Status: offline

Nice! I'll have to test it myself; but I too had issues with monsernum.vbs. It would be great if I could replace my existing w/this. Do you have a blog here? or have you ever submitted an article here? This is good blog/article material.

_____________________________

mofmaster@smsexpert.com (version 2007) | http://www.smsexpert.com | http://www.sccmexpert.com
My Blog
Microsoft MVP - ConfigMgr

(in reply to MhermanNBME)

Post #: 2

RE: Inventory Monitors and serial numbers - 7/30/2008 7:58:41 AM

fracine

Posts: 1629
Score: 23
Joined: 11/17/2001
From: Québec, Canada
Status: offline

What is happening when the monitor is connect to a switch box?

_____________________________

François Racine
Technicien

Please rate my post :)

(in reply to MhermanNBME)

Post #: 3

RE: Inventory Monitors and serial numbers - 7/30/2008 10:55:02 AM

MhermanNBME

Posts: 78
Score: 3
Joined: 4/4/2007
Status: offline

skissinger:
Thanks for the feedback, let me know how it goes for you. No i haven't done any blogs or articles on here yet. I want to clean up the script a bit, but maybe after that I'll look into it.

fracine:
I don't know, we don't really have any of them here. My guess is any of the computers that were booted up with the monitor "attached", (ie. you see the bios screen), will be able to get the edid info. I'm not sure but I think I read somewhere that the bios needs to see it to make it available to windows. For example if you have a 4port a-d, and your switch is on a, and you turn all 4 on at the same time, only a will have the edid information.

The way the script works right now, it doesn't erase any previous monitors, so you would think, eventually all 4 would end up running the script while able to get the EDID info, and therefore report it to sccm.

(in reply to fracine)

Post #: 4