Manually edit location?

I tried to manually edit the location field in the database, but it did not seem to stick.  It would just revert back to 'null' after a few seconds.

Is there anyway this can be done via a custom property or through another method?   We are running into the same problem and would like to use the Location field but some devices are either incorrect (because the vendor didn't give access to all snmp settings) or not available because of no snmp. 

 To us if we could have it like a custom property where if it was blank it used the snmp found value but if we set it to something it would use the value we set. 

You could probably put together a calculated SQL column. First add a custom property (I call it "CustomLocation" but you could call it anything), then run SQL like this:

ALTER TABLE Nodes ADD COLUMN EitherLocation AS ISNULL(CustomLocation, Location)

Then use Custom Property Editor to update your report schemas again. Now you will have a custom property called "EitherLocation" that behaves like you describe: if CustomLocation is non-null, it will be used. Otherwise the Location column (populated from SNMP) will be used instead.

Thank you very much!  Would this be considered "supported?"

I would expect it to keep working in the future. If you have problems with it, we can help you out on Thwack. Does that cover your needs for support?

I think that is good.  We have 2 installations that we'll be using it on, I just want to make sure we can keep it working and consistent.

 Have you tried the Engineers Toolset "Update System MIB" tool?  Allows you to set things like location via SNMP assuming you have write privs on SNMP.   I've found quite a few devices to be lax in that respect and have been able to take care of quite a few of my problem nodes this way...

We don't have the Engineers Toolset at this point but I'm looking at it.  I've used GetIf to do that before but I don't have responibilites for all the devices and not all people understand that you can do those kinds of things.  Our Adtran products were very much that way and they report correctly now instead of saying "Huntsville, Alabama." :) 

You could probably put together a calculated SQL column. First add a custom property (I call it "CustomLocation" but you could call it anything), then run SQL like this: ALTER TABLE Nodes ADD COLUMN EitherLocation AS ISNULL(CustomLocation, Location) Then use Custom Property Editor to update your report schemas again. Now you will have a custom property called "EitherLocation" that behaves like you describe: if CustomLocation is non-null, it will be used. Otherwise the Location column (populated from SNMP) will be used instead.

 Is there any chance this would break the web interface for adding nodes?  I've tried to add a few today and keep getting script errors on the page. 

Line: 6
Char: 62099
Error: Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException: An unknown error occurred while processing the request on the server.  The status code returned from the server was: 500
Code: 0
URL: http://NPMSERVER:8080/Orion/Nodes/Add/Properties.aspx

The device gets added but none of the properties are there.