1

I had an interesting issue with device scanning. Had a laptop that hadn’t updated it’s details since the middle of last year so I brought it into my office and attempted to scan it, spiceworks found the device but still wouldn’t update the scan date or any details of the laptop.

Used search to see if any other device was using the IP address and only this laptop popped up, so looked at the Network Scan page and it showed another computer was being checked on this IP address. I looked up this computer, it showed a different IP address but when I looked at the configuration page, there it was, attached to the wireless connection, which for this computer is switched off.

How do you remove IP addresses from the Configuration page? Shouldn’t the scan compare the IP address to the mac address before determining which device is updated?

To get the laptop scanned I had to disable this IP address from being assigned on the DHCP server, turn off and on the wireless on the laptop so It’d get a new IP address and then it scanned correctly.

This also dovetails into my other pet peeve, having spiceworks create devices with only an IP address. If you can’t get the MAC address don’t make the device!

2 Spice ups
2

This is probably related to DNS related issues, the old IP is probably matching something else in DNS, if Spiceworks scans your ranges listed in the scans and finds the port open, it wont scan the machine that is actually there if DNS says it belongs to something else, it will scan the something else registered in DNS (so you don’t see the update on the machine you expect).

Ensure DNS scavenging is enabled on all DCs/DNS servers

3

I checked the DNS settings at the time and they were pointed to the Laptop not the other computer.

4

We don’t really update an IP on an old device - we leave it as the last known IP - but if we find a new device with that same IP, and we can tell it’s a new device (we can pull the serial number or mac address), then we will define the new device with that information, reusing the IP. If we’re able to scan the device that had the original IP again later, it would just be updated with whatever new IP we grab.

Note that we fixed a few issues around this in 7.5, so you’re more likely to see duplicate devices and misbehavior around this in versions prior to that.

Jackie.

5

It is a current device with the IP address used on a secondary connection. Since I forced the laptop to use a different IP, the other device has finally worked out that the wireless is switched off. But you are right, this would have been scanned on 7.4 and by the time I installed 7.5, the laptop would have already been using the same IP address.