<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> RayManageSoft Unified Endpoint Manager > 3.1 u8 > User Guide > Appendix I: Preference Settings for Managed Devices > Alphabetical Listing of Preference Settings for Managed Devices  SMBIOSCmdLine

Command-line | Registry

 

Specifies the command-line used to invoke smbios2.exe to gather BIOS information during zero-touch hardware inventory collection. This setting is not used during the normal inventory collection by RayManageSoft Unified Endpoint Manager.

 

The smbios2.exe is a utility developed by IBM that RayManageSoft Unified Endpoint Manager uses to collect a range of information about a computer if WMI is not available on the computer. It is possible to execute smbios2.exe /h by hand to obtain information about possible command arguments that can be used with the smbios2.exe.

 

The default value of the SMBIOSCmdLine setting includes the /G option, which attempts to collect as much information about the computer as possible. The /G option collects BIOS information using one particular approach, which very old BIOSes may not support. If old BIOSes are in use within an organization, customizing this preference setting value to use the /a option instead of /G should be considered. /a uses an alternative approach for collecting information which is supported by older BIOSes. However, use of the /a option is known to result in problems such as hangs and crashes on some more recent hardware, including many Dell and IBM computers.

 

Relative paths to executables in this preference setting are treated as relative to the directory containing ndtrack.exe.

 

This setting can be set to an empty value in order to prevent the inventory agent from using the smbios2.exe tool. This results in less BIOS information being collected during zero-touch hardware inventory collection.

 

The command-line used to execute smbios2.exe normally includes conspawn, as shown in the default value below. conspawn is an executable used by RayManageSoft Unified Endpoint Manager to reliably execute 16-bit DOS applications on various versions of Windows.

 

In order to successfully use smbios2.exe to gather inventory data, smbios2.exe, conspawn.exe, and ide21201.vxd should all exist in the same directory as ntrack.exe.

 

 

Command-line

 

Registry