Question about working with groups
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EDIT: I think I might have figured it out. I’ll get back to this post later, but it seems I glossed over George’s first sentence (which wasn’t quoted in the quote below), which mentioned a plugin to give exactly the usage I need. Once I understood what I was reading, I found his post titled Basic Persistent groups and I will try to follow his instructions to get this working. I’ll let you all know how it goes.
EDIT 2: So I activated the persistent groups plugin, created a host called LOBmulticast, set its image association and AD details, then created a group with the same name of LOBmulticast. The group doesn’t have any of the host’s settings still. Setting them in the host and saving it doesn’t work either. Am I supposed to follow a specific pattern with the name or whatnot?
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I’m not sure if I have had the wrong idea about the purpose and use of groups, but I’ve tried using them a couple times with varying levels of success. For example, my company has two different images (and AD domains) used for two separate lines of business.
I tried creating groups named LOB1group and LOB2group, setting image association and Active Directory info, then when registering new hosts associating them with one group or another and skipping questions about image name and whether or not I want to join the domain, but it ends up leaving those bits blank.
Today, I came across a post @george1421 made in Custom Full Host Registration Menu in which he said:
You create a template host and link it with a group. Then when you add a new host to that group, the template host settings get copied to the new host.
This morning, I created 4 new hosts, each with random MAC addresses. “LOB1template” and “test[1-4].” In LOB1template, I set its image association and AD details and then joined it to LOB1group. I noticed the group now had the proper image association, but still didn’t have any AD details filled in. I went ahead and filled those in and saved the group. After that, I added test[1-4]. The group lost its AD details and none of the hosts had image association OR AD details populated in their respective pages. Yesterday, however, I was able to add a bunch of hosts to the group, then apply settings to the group, which populated on the hosts. That doesn’t really seem to make sense though - having to set the group details AFTER adding hosts, since then it’s less automated.
Another question about the template host idea; when I go to perform a multicast, wouldn’t it never start, because it would be waiting on LOB1template to join the multicast, which wouldn’t happen since it’s not real?
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Sorry I couldn’t respond sooner. The name of the group and the template host has to match exactly. The plugin works by creating a database trigger. When a host is added to the group the db trigger fires and updates the inserted host with the data assigned to the template host.
The tutorial from your edit is the best one we have so far. I know I should write one that is a bit cleaner but free time is short at the moment.
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Hey George,
No worries on the delays. Work’s been busy for me too, but today is slow finally.
I realize I messed up how I explained things. I was creating a template host with the same exact name as the group. After not being able to get it working, I tried your example name of TemplHost01 for both a new group and new host. I set the details on the host, added it to the group, and still nothing.
So I just tried again today, and the functionality is working as expected. Curious … I wonder it just needed a little more time.
I’ll play with it a bit more and see if everything seems to be good.Yeah, it definitely seems to be working better now, including with groups/host-templates that I name. I’m not sure what was happening the other day.
One thing which seems like a bug: if I’m in a group and I navigate to Membership to then search for and add additional hosts, it only adds one at a time even if I click the checkbox for multiple.
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