Set Up Symantec Ghost Console 11.5 to reference its machine groups from Active Directory

Question

I am trying to set our Ghost Console so it would reference AD for the Machine Groups so every time I move a computer around in active directory, it would update accordingly. I have researched about it and nothing has come up about how to do so. I want to be able to do this so I can schedule tasks to certain computer groups to run at a certain period. Thanks

Answer 1

The connection between a client machine and it's member domain (including the AD container membership) is a part of the machine configuration that the management system understands innately. As such, it's updated whenever you do a "Configuration Refresh" task just as things like the computer name are.

Unfortunately the AD structure which the clients have are not visible as a folder structure in the GSS management console UI - and indeed, that application doesn't do much of anything else with the machine configuration either, like provide a search facility. The "dynamic folder" facility in the GSS management console which you can use to target groups of machines for tasks is unfortunately driven only off WMI Inventory data, and doesn't reference the machine configuration data (which is stored separately in the underlying database - the inventory system was added around Ghost Enterprise 7.5 whereas the main GSS console and configuration system dates back to Ghost Enterprise 6.0 in 1999).

If you had asked this a few years ago before Symantec shut down development of the product and laid off the development team we could perhaps have done something more for you. As it is, if you want to use AD containers for tasks probably the easiest thing for you to do is to write some scripts to take the machine's current folder out of the configuration data table in the GSS database and use that to adjust the (non-dynamic) folder membership.

You can see a collection of scripts which manipulate the GSS console database through VBScript at http://code.google.com/p/gss-scripts/ - those show you how you can get ADO access to the database. The core machine configuration settings are stored in the "Configuration" and "ConfParam" tables, and the folder memberships of machines are in the "MachineView" table.