As we all know (and you may have heard my spiel 100x's) we classify computers based on their Operating System, network devices primarily by their capabilities. Meaning a Windows Server OS will go into the Windows Server class, Windows desktops in the computer class, Linux OS in the Linux Server Class.....ect ect..

But what about the gray areas? I've had the recent occasion to hear from friends that have a lot of Linux based desktops and they were not so pleased with the fact that while licensing says you get all the desktops you want, servers cost. Why? they ask, do my Linux laptops incur a charge while Microsoft gets a pass?

Well, I have an answer that I hope some of my community friends can use to help them shine some light on those gray areas.

Attached is an update set that adds few things including a new question called Form Factor in the Unix Classify multi-probe

This command pulls back the enclosure type from DMIDECODE (an OOB command we already use that requires sudo)

It takes that value, matches it to a particular group and sets a classification parameter in the MultiSensor Script

so that you can trigger a specific classifier, which puts it in the computer class if personalComputer = true

As you will see I continued to use probes/sensors, because well... Probes and Sensors for life but I could have replicated the Linux server pattern and re-factored all the tables and such, but way to complicated for such a simple need.

Either way, hopefully, you can find this useful.