Tranquil IT Forum

Hello,

For the past few months, some of our physical machines (Dell or HP) have been showing up twice in the console, with two almost identical UUIDs, either all lowercase or all uppercase. This is using up two licenses instead of one, and since we're operating on a tight budget, it's almost a problem...

The issue isn't widespread, nor did it appear suddenly. Looking more closely, on just under 350 workstations, we have about a dozen UUIDs with lowercase letters (OS = Windows 10 Pro or Education, no cases under Windows 11, agent version 2.4.0 - BIOS/UEFI updates on the machines vary).

Has anyone else experienced this?

Server info: WAPT Enterprise 2.4.0.14143-9847ee8b-debian-11-amd64 (Debian 11.7)

Hi Arnaud,

the problem can arise when WMI isn't responding correctly. In that case, WAPT will use dmidecode to get the UUID, which can be in uppercase or lowercase. There might also be inversions of certain bytes for some BIOS versions. You can check this by looking in the hardware inventory to see if you have both a "dmi" and a "wmi" key in the root directory.

If the "wmi" part is missing, it means the WMI inventory is crashing on the machine; often it's the WBEM part. You can then look for traditional commands like winmgmt /resetrepository or re-registering the MOF files (I don't remember them offhand).

Regarding the deduplication problem itself, we've prepared some measures to mitigate it in the upcoming version 2.5.

Regards,

Denis

Thanks Denis for announcing the implementation of "safeguards" for version 2.5, that's reassuring.

Indeed, UUIDs with lowercase letters correspond to machines (with some history) whose WMI hardware inventory is empty: we will address this issue.

Thanks for the feedback, Arnaud.
See you soon,
Denis.