Lists in SIM5 are useless

[Kevin Kelling]

Try this at home:

1) Create a list based on the existence of a software component -- such as ANY firemware version for a Smart 6i controller. The list will work fine initially.

2) Check back the next day and every device known by SIM will appear in the same list. If you try to edit the list, the crtieria is no longer displayed and can not be added. Your only option is to delete and create a new list until it too self destructs in 24 hours.

Had this problem since the original release of SIM 5.0. I've tried adding SP2 but that didn't help.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Anyone know how to correct this?

Thanks!

[JP_26]

could you please run the following command before and after this happens on the list and see if they are different. If possible attach the results here?

mxquery -l f -x query ""

Thanks

[Kevin Kelling]

Just to be clear I when I said "above" I meant the first example.

In other words, any list I have that is based on software attributes, does NOT display the criteria when the MXQUERY command is run -- except for on the same day the list is created.

Will see how this looks in the AM.

[Kevin Brusky]

Are you by any chance changing the repository you're using between edits?

Have you tried other components than Smart Array FW?

This only happens for SW/FW lists, right? Other lists work fine?

Have you tried editing the list immediately after saving it? I'm guessing the query is not getting saved properly and that waiting a day isn't necessary. An error is occurring for some reason during the save of the SW/FW criteria portion of the query and without that criteria the query has no 'filters' and will simply return all of the devices.

[Kevin Kelling]

Whatever changes being made to the repository happen automatically. We connect each night and are adding new servers every week.

Yes, we have lists for ILO firmware, HP Agent versions, other array controllers and more. I've had this problem with any software/hardware based list I've done so far (product model will work fine however).

I can't recall the specific details of each time I've struggled with this since September but what usually happens is that the list initially works fine, but after an unknown number of days -- usually within a week, the list will return every device in the SIM database and if you try to edit the list it will never show you the attributes you have chosen.

I noticed that after creating a new list earlier this week it was showing up with 0 matches. Software status polling normally runs every 10 days or so, but I manually kicked one off, and the next time I tried it was populated correctly.

So far after about 2-3 days the new lists are still working. If they are still working by next week I'll be shocked because it never has since we've been at SIM 5.0.

I plan on installing SP3 as soon as I can (Monday?) to see if it might shake things up and fix this.

[Kevin Kelling]

Here's an update after SP3....

Things were fine for the first 5 days.

Last night the server was rebooted.

Following the reboot all of the software/hardware lists had a membership of zero. Editing the lists reveals a single (regardless of how many there were) software/hardware condition statement with all of the fields blank. (!!)

This is different from SP2 behavior where the queries would not be displayed and membership would be all devices.

We only had SP3 for 5 days so its anyone's guess what would have happened if the server had not been rebooted. But a reboot should not cause the lists to be invalidated like this.

And it takes over an hour to manually recreate all the software/hardware lists that we rely on.

This is very disruptive and very disappointing. I know SIM is a free product but we do buy a lot of HP hardware and rely on HP SIM to track it.