NetVoyant Duplicates Finder

UPDATE: This method has been replaced by the ODBC method.

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I've been working for a while now on a good way to find and remove duplicates from NetVoyant.  Luckily, there is a web service that can delete devices (more on NetQoS web services).  All you need is the device IP address and the poller (to build the web service URL).  I played around for a while trying to build something in a windows batch file and couldn't get it to do what I wanted to do.  So, I reverted to Perl (which I probably should have done from the beginning).  Anyway, the result is a script that can be run regularly on the NetVoyant master console.  The output is a CSV file and an html file.  The CSV file contains the output from the brains of the duplicate finder script, namely: a list of every device that exists more than once in the NV system, along with the device properties including the poller.  The CSV file is output to the script directory.  The script can be configured to output the html file wherever you want.

After that, the script uses perl to wrap the data in the CSV into an html widget.  The widget shows the same data as the CSV as well as a link on every line to delete the device.  As long as the NV pollers resolve by name, the link should work to delete the device and its corresponding scope.  If you only want the CSV, edit the batch file and comment out the call to the Perl script (i.e. put 'rem' in front of the line that start with the word 'perl').

If you do want the HTML, you'll need to install Strawberry Perl and download a couple of modules.  Installing Strawberry Perl on the NetQoS boxes isn't a new thing.  Most of the developers and support guys have Perl installed on their test boxes and I've had it installed on many customers' boxes.  The install doesn't require a reboot and you can take all the defaults.  After doing the install, open a command prompt and type the following:

D:\>cpan Text::CSV
D:\>cpan Text::CSV_XS

Perl will download and install the necessary modules and return you to the command prompt when its done.

After that, all you need to do is download the zip and extract the files to somewhere on your NVMC.  Setup a scheduled task to run the batch file every so often.  The web page doesn't update unless the script runs (it doesn't refresh the list of duplicate devices simply by refreshing the page).

To get the script to output the html file to somewhere other than the script directory, go to the makehtml.pl file and modify the line that starts with 'my $outputfile = ' and update the output file path and name.  For example:

my $outputfile = 'D:\\NetVoyant\\Portal\\WebSite\\dupslist.html'

Perl requires a double backslash since a single backslash is the escape character.

That's it.  You're done.  You can use the browser view to put the resulting html file on an NPC page if you've designated a destination that is served up by the NVMC's IIS web service.

Enjoy!  If you have improvements, please let me know so I can update the source.

P.S. If you don't have internet access on the box, you won't be able to install the Text::CSV modules to install (since they come from the internet).  The solution is to download the Text::CSV and Text::CSV_XS tarballs and extract them using winzip or winrar or 7z.  You might need to extract several times until you get just the folder with the files in them.  Then copy them to the NVMC.  Open a command prompt and cd to the directory containing Makefile.pl (you'll have to do this for each one).  Then execute the following:

perl Makefile.PL && dmake && dmake test && dmake install

Do Text::CSV first, then Text::CSV_XS.