However, a funny thing happened when that simple concept met the messy real world: the one device, one serial number notion turned into as many as five serial numbers on Intel-based computers. I've lightlyLoony/blog/2008/11/1/1912talked about this before, but in our future releases (starting with Stable 3, just released last Friday) we've taken another step: Discovery now exposes this surfeit of serials to you (at Discovery→Serials). I know of these uses (but you may think of others):
- Eliminating invalid serial numbers. Now that you can see all the serial numbers Discovery finds, you may see some invalid ones that need to be added to the invalid serial number table (Discovery Definition→Invalid Serial Numbers).
- Choosing a different serial number. You may have a particular make of computer (or even a model!) for which you'd like to use a different serial number than the one Discovery chooses. Now you can make use of the serial number table in your business rules to do exactly that.
- Discovery CI Consolidation. This is another new feature that I'll discuss in detail in another post.
At right you can see an example of a serial number table. This one shows the serial numbers Discovery found for four computers here at the Wooden Spaceship. Even in this short list, you can see how messy the world of serial numbers is on Intel-based computer hardware. There's one example (sandb02) that has four serial numbers — and every one of them is invalid. There's another example (sandb01) that has five serial numbers, only one of which is valid. And then there's sandb03 and sandb04, two virtual machines, each of which has two valid serial numbers — but the serial numbers are different from each other.I don't know what you'll see when you look at the serial number table after Discovery explores your network. But based on what I've seen out in the wild, I feel safe predicting that you'll be surprised!
