Feature request Maybe

[dustydorey]

Hello there,

I was wondering if anyone knew of a good way to grab down information
that would normally be found in the System Profiler.

For example, with the growing list of possible bad hard drives from
Seagate and other companies I'd love to be able to create a smartlist
built around what machines have drives with certain model numbers.

Does this sound crazy? Or is there already a good way to do this that
I'm over looking?

Have a good one.

-Dusty-

Dustin Dorey

Technology Support Cluster Specialist

ISD 196 Apple Valley, Eagan, Rosemount

dustin.dorey at district196.org

952|423|7971

[tlarkin]

Due to our increasing number of drive failures in our laptops I too am
looking into what is causing it. I do not know if the Seagate recall
affects laptop drives or not, but it is my most promising lead at the
moment.

You could run a report that did this and it works for me so far

system_profiler SPSerialATADataType -detaillevel mini

Then you may want to input a variable of listed affected model numbers,
do an if then statement to see if the models match and then if they do,
to output that text to a log file or pipe out an email command so you
can inventory it.

If you come up with anything please post it.

Thanks,

---

Thomas Larkin
TIS Department
KCKPS USD500
tlarki at kckps.org
blackberry: 913-449-7589
office: 913-627-0351

[milesleacy]

This would be a perfect problem to solve with scripts and dummy receipts.
Capture the output of:

system_profiler SPSerialATADataType

grep for the model number. If found, issue a custom trigger to install the
dummy receipt. If not found, delete the dummy receipt.

Scope your smart group of "machines with suspect Seagate drives" to those
with this receipt.

----------
Miles A. Leacy IV

? Certified System Administrator 10.4
? Certified Technical Coordinator 10.5
? Certified Trainer
Certified Casper Administrator
----------
voice: 1-347-277-7321
miles.leacy at themacadmin.com
www.themacadmin.com

[tlarkin]

Yup,

Just see the system_profile binary in terminal. There are many data
types and that is how casper inventories machines. You can use grep or
sed to get specific information and have it run as a policy or over ARD
Admin and run custom reports.

I did a custom report for battery information on laptops last year for
someone. Can't remember what exactly I used syntax wise but it
basically pulled out how many power cycles the battery has had and its
current charge along with the computer name and serial number and then
dumped them into a spread sheet.

There is no way from the GUI to do this to my knowledge, so you may
have to get down and dirty with the command line.

---

Thomas Larkin
TIS Department
KCKPS USD500
tlarki at kckps.org
blackberry: 913-449-7589
office: 913-627-0351

[dustydorey]

Looks like I'm going to have to script this out, thanks for the input folks. I may have to use your idea on the battery cycles too as that will be good info as well.

Thanks again.
-Dusty-

Dustin Dorey
Technology Support Cluster Specialist
ISD 196 Apple Valley, Eagan, Rosemount
dustin.dorey at district196.org
952|423|7971

[dustydorey]

The most recent issue with the Seagate drives affects drives produced in December, so I’m not sure how many are “in the wild” and where they are. But there was an article in tuaw today about it and it links to the Seagate Knowledge Base and such. I was earlier thinking more in terms of that bad batch of drives that was known to have gone into macbooks about 18 months ago or so. We had one school that had about a 30% failure rate on HD’s in Macbooks in less than 18 months which seems high. And even in our office out of 4 Macboks purchased the summer of 07 three have had the Hard drives replaced. So I am looking into more in depth reports on the laptops.

http://www.tuaw.com/2009/01/19/tick-tick-tick-significant-number-of-seagate-hard-drives-fail/

-Dusty-

Dustin Dorey

Technology Support Cluster Specialist

ISD 196 Apple Valley, Eagan, Rosemount

dustin.dorey at district196.org

952|423|7971

[tlarkin]

We partnered with a local apple authorized service center to do all of
our warranty work as we do not have the staff to do hardware repairs on
6,000 Macbooks. I asked them if this was maybe related to our HD
failures, they said they don't get seagate HDs from Apple. They for the
most part get Samsung and Hitachi.

I am seeing lots and lots of HD failures though like the issue
explained which makes me think maybe it is a chip level problem since
probably only maybe one or two companies actually develop the HD
components them self.

Keep us posted what you find.

---

Thomas Larkin
TIS Department
KCKPS USD500
tlarki at kckps.org
blackberry: 913-449-7589
office: 913-627-0351