Upgrading device software with no inventory collected?

[ggolding]

Following on from topic "Network Management: LMS 2.5.1 SP4 "Devices for which Inventory has never been collected", I tried to schedule a software job to upgrade some 1200aps to 123-4 code so that I could get the inventory status of them.

However LMS 2.5.1, RME 4.0.4 doesn't appear to offer any way to submit a job on devices that have no inventory collected? Does anyone have any idea (apart from the traditional manual, non-scheduled method) of how to get around this "chicken & egg" issue?

Thanks

[David Stanford]

You won't be able to get around this until they do an inventory collection.

Until the inventory collection is done, you won't get to use the full functionality of RME and in order to do an image upgrade it would have to be done manually.

[ggolding]

It would be a big improvement to the product if there was a manual override for this. Afterall, in this case it is just a few revisions of IOS on 1200 AP's making the differenece between RME being able to succesfully get an inventory.

For that matter, why does it fail in the first place? Surely the SNMP value for the amount of RAM & Flash shouldn't change between minor revisions of IOS code???

[miheg]

It's not that simple to get good info from the mibs. There is a lot of crap coming back from many SNMP devices. Partially supported mibs, etc. A real jungle.

This is why ciscoworks relies heavily on the package files that basically contains info on what mibs are ok for what type of information and especially are safe to do a SNMP set on to start a function for a particular device.

Just try yourself to get the serial numbers from different Cisco devices and you will see what I mean.

I do believe however that ciscoworks should be familiar enough with Cisco devices to make some well educated guesses and maybe find there noting much new about a certain 'new' device.

Hopefully this will be addressed in future versions of ciscoworks.

Cheers,

Michel