Dealing with Ghost imaged WSUS clients (again)
A customer I recently met was having problems with many workstations not ever showing up in their WSUS administration console. After eliminating the usual suspects, I learned they were imaging their XP clients with Symantec Ghost. I don't want to poo-poo anyone's favorite imaging product, but I personally despise Ghost. It has caused me more headaches than it has ever cured. And it's expensive. So anyhow, on to the exciting story (can't you feel the excitement already?! -- I thought so...)...
I know that duplicate SID's and GUID's will cause WSUS (and many other applications) a lot of grief, so I needed to make sure they knew that first. The good news is that they're already at work getting RIS to do what they need. Yes, I advised them of WDS and BDD/MDS but they're excited about the results from RIS so far, so I don't want to keep raining on their parade. Next step was to identify which machines on the network had duplicate ID numbers. In comes Sysinternals' (now Microsoft) PSTOOLS and the wonderful PSGetSid utility. I downloaded it, ran it as follows...
>psgetsid.exe -u domainname\username -p password \\* >computer_sids.txt
When it finished, the text file is line-formated (each entry on a new line, with an empty line between blocks of data). I wrote a script to open, read and parse the data and pump it into Excel to do some sorting and correlation and quickly identify the duplicates. Then for each I ran another script to remotely clear out the WSUS client registry keys. Instead of stopping and restarting the services remotely, I simply forced a restart on each one and that did the trick. Within a few hours most were starting to show up in WSUS. PSTOOLS saved me again. I could have pulled SID data from all of them using a script, but PsGetSid makes it so much simpler and easier. I know that I could have done the collection and sorting in other ways, such as either using a virtual database recordset or a "real" db table feed, to even an XML file, but Excel is pretty good for such things and is very easy to control on a leash. It was a good day.
