Re: [CampusManager] Campus Manager Client Management
"Rick Leclerc" <leclerc@bradford-sw.com> writes:
When I look at ALL clients in the Clients View, there are some students that have registered more than one machine, or that perhaps a different student registered his machine as a different student. Since I can't tell which is which, I can't figure out how to deal with it. Also, the groups that I have were imported from Active Directory, so if a student has registered a second machine, then that second entry is not part of the group. Has anyone else encountered this same situation?
One way to handle this would be to manually cross reference the client entry that IS in the group view with the students that have multiple machines, then manually add the additional client records to the group. In this case, a student would be listed multiple times in the group, once for each machine they have registered. Please respond if you have done something like this or have any suggestions.
If I understand the question, and your database system...
You could normalize your client databases. That doesn't help you now but would prevent the problem in the future... I get the impression that your database is just a series of flat client records in a table and when a client registers a second computer, a duplicate is created.
If this is true, then by investing some energy into switching to a relational database in third normal form (there are numerous textbooks available on relational databases) you should be able to associate multiple computer registrations with one person, that person would also be associated with any applicable groups, and each registration by virtue of its relation to the individual's record should get those attributes... this would eliminate a lot of duplicate information (thereby shrinking database sizes, speeding up queries, etc) and would make it a heck of a lot easier to develop more powerful queries.
What I envision you being able to do after making this change is: altering the interface so that by clicking on one person's name in the clients list, you would be able to pull up a client view with all the associated registration records. Conversely, you could look at a query of individual registrations, and pull up the clients personal information. This would also mean that if a person changes their name or phone, and they have five computers registered (heaven forbid), we only have to change it in one place and all the registrations get the change... okay now i'm getting off-track, but I hope you get the idea.
I could fill-in details of how this might be done, but then that gets out of theory and into design, so I'll leave that to your imagination, if you think this is the problem.
HTH and is somewhat clear
Since Bradford does not provide a mechanism to automatically age clients from the database, how are you keeping your databases up-to-date? If a MAC address has not been heard for a month or two, are you deleting that Rogue Client from the database?
__________________________________________
David M. Leuser, II * Assistant Network Administrator
New Hampton School * PH/Fax: (603) 677-3451
77 Main Street * New Hampton, NH 03256
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Received on Mon Jan 19 2004 - 20:34:53 EST
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