SMS: Child Site Attachment May Result in Incorrect Inventory

When a child site attaches to a parent site, inventory on the parent site may appear to be inaccurate. Inventory on the child site appears to be correct, but the inventory on the parent site does not.

The first child to attach to the parent may appear correct, but the inaccurate inventory may appear when a second child attaches. Symptoms will manifest in data that is stored as COMMON rather than SPECIFIC according to the DMTF specifications. Examples of this would be in the PC_BIOS or Disk data, although any COMMON storage may be affected. Symptoms may be displayed as a duplicate drive C or no drive A for certain systems. Other symptoms may exhibit themselves as well, but depends on the state of the child and parent databases before the site attachment.

This problem occurs only during initial site attachments. Any data sent from the child to the parent after the initial site attachment is processed differently, and is not affected.

The Systems Management Server DataLoader fails to properly increment an internal value that ensures that the COMMON storage values remain unique during a site attachment. This only occurs if the COMMON storage attribute does not yet exist on the parent site. If the component already exists on the parent site, child site data merging will take place properly for that inventory component.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Systems Management Server version 1.2. This problem was corrected in the latest Microsoft Systems Management Server 1.2 U.S. Service Pack. For information on obtaining the service pack, query on the following word in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (without the spaces):