Is there a way to prevent losing an asset with same name?

[wcb]

I am not sure if this is because of rename detection or something else but here is the situation. We had a PC taken out by a lightning surge, probably through the Ethernet port. Let's say this was asset 100. The tech took the hard drive from the dead PC (100) and put it into a different PC. This other PC had been in the system before so it had an asset entry, say 101. What it looks like is asset 101 is detected by MAC and windows rename detection updates the name for asset 101. Now I cannot find any trace of asset 100. The name is the unique key so there can't be 2 of them so asset 100 must either be renamed or deleted. It seems that it was deleted.

I would have preferred to mark it as destroyed and be able to track that. I can manually re-enter it but would rather have the asset history still there. I would like to not have to trust all our techs to remember to do something in Lansweeper before fixing a dead PC. They should do it, but you know they wont.

What's the answer?

Edit to add: We are on version 6.0.100.75.

[Esben_D · Accepted solution]

I understand that the loss of an asset in the situation you described is a problem. Unfortunately, when Lansweeper finds (what it considers) two identical assets, there is no reason to keep them both. I was simply trying to give you some tips which you can use for the foreseeable future to prevent this from happening again.

I'll add the request to the Windows rename detection improvements feature request.

[wcb]

I'm still not sure you are grasping what my issue is. Or maybe you do but don't consider the data loss as big an issue as I do. Let me put it this way.

Asset 100
Name PC-Bob
Serial ABC123

Asset 101
Name PC-Dave
Serial DEF345

Asset 100 (PC-Bob) has a motherboard failure. Asset 101 isn't being used right now so we want to get Bob up and running. We take his hard drive and put it in PC-Dave. Bob is working again. But Lansweeper has correctly detected that Asset 101 now reports as PC-Bob so it renames Asset 101 to PC-Bob. That is a correct and welcome action. What should not happen is to delete Asset 100 since it has a trackable property - the serial number. It should rename Asset 100 to something else, perhaps the serial number or the serial number plus something else, or even generate a unique GUID. It's not losing the name PC-Dave that bothers me. It is losing track of serial ABC123 that bothers me.

There are times when rename detection should delete an existing record. I just had an instance where we took an older laptop and put it back into service. We gave it a new name and this name got picked up from active directory and inserted into lansweeper. Due to firewall issues it did not pick up the details of this new asset for a while. When it did scan it, rename detection found the old record, applied the new name, and deleted the record that had been picked up from active directory. This is a good thing since there was no trackable or identifiable properties to that asset record.

Whether this gets labeled a bug or enhancement request or new feature, I don't care. I would just like to see it addressed so this stops happening.

[Esben_D]

If rename detection did happen then asset 100 will indeed be gone. The only way to prevent this in the future would be to turn off Windows rename detection or to change the asset's serial or model before a rescan happens so it won't meet the requirements for a merge.

[wcb]

I know that the rename detection worked on what I am calling asset 101. I saw the entry updating that asset. What I am having a problem with is that asset 100 is nowhere to be found. It was not database cleanup. I don't have it on. I have entries for PCs that have not been seen in months. Asset 100 was off the network at most 1 week before they found another of the same model PC to plug the hard drive in and give it back to the user.

[Esben_D]

You can find the requirements for Windows rename detection here: https://www.lansweeper.com/kb/87/windows-rename-detection.html

If Windows rename detection did kick in, there should be a comment on the asset's page indicating this happened.

Database cleanup options might also have deleted this asset if these were active and strict enough to delete the asset. Information about the database cleanup options can be found here: https://www.lansweeper.com/kb/167/performing-automated-database-cleanups.html

Personally, I suspect that rename detection did its thing.