Duplicate Inventory items

[lwindram]

Is there a mechanism within Casper to merge duplicate inventory items? We often end up with duplicates after a device comes back from repair. Same serial number and Mac Address, but a different UUID - therefore a new record is created. It would be nice to preserve the data from the original item instead of deleting it.

[mm2270]

Not sure if there's any merge capability, but you could edit the original Mac record to have the MAC Addresses and UDID match the new machine. That can be done directly in the JSS against the Mac's record, so no mucking with the database required. It should then report in to that record and take it over.
I haven't tested that out thoroughly, so I would experiment first to see what the results are, but that should work.
Thing is, you'd want to do that as soon as possible so you aren't building up (and thus losing) a lot history on the newly created record. You'd need to delete that new record once the old one starts being used by the Mac.

[Chris_Hafner]

So far as I've seen, no; There is not a simple way within the JSS to identify duplicate UDID, MAC or SN. Not saying it can't be done. Just that it would probably be a feature request at this point. Unfortunately, I'm kind of thinking that it isn't a bad idea to request once fleshed out. We've managed to deal with this rather well so far but we do not have an automated mechanism in place to catch these situations.

Also: Yes, if you update the UDID of the original record that will sort things out on that record moving forward and you will want to delete the extra record created so as to ensure that you're original record is the one that continues to be used. Mind you, we are making an assumption that you are running JSS 9.x and not 8.x which used the primary MAC (en0) as the identifier.

P.S. There can and will be duplicates no matter what physical identifier is used. i.e. nothing ever stays the same forever ;-)