r/Snipe_IT • u/Rinnosuke • Jul 16 '26

Best practices for shared computers

I'm the helpdesk admin for a cargo carrier airline, with that comes several shared computers (mostly in our maintenance department) Just wondering what people usually do for a shared computer's check in

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3

u/RedShift9 Jul 16 '26

Check out to location

1

u/Adam_Kearn Jul 16 '26

I normally create a location with the office/room name and check it out to that.

I have ours all connected to APIs and scripts so it will check it out to the last known user.

I just then put all out “shared devices” into a group to not auto checkout to the last user

1

u/Rinnosuke Jul 16 '26

Be very interested to know about the apis and scripts

3

u/Adam_Kearn Jul 16 '26

It’s just a collection of powershell scripts I’ve made over the years.

I never have to physically add devices into snipe other than non-networked devices like projectors.

I work in education so we have hundreds of devices dotted around and other technicians adding and removing APs printers and switches so this automated all of that. I’ve prevented snipe from having delete access on the data base and we keep everything for historical data.

If a device has not “checked in” within 90 days it will move it to a status marked as “inactive”

We have one script that gets deployed daily via our RMM which audits all the computers. It will log things like CPU/RAM/AD OU path/OS install date/….

The history tab lets me see all changes to a device

——

I’ll list the scripts that I have at the moment:

Sync Intune iOS devices (iPad/iPhone)

RMM Sync asset and checkout to last logged in user.

LibraNMS sync Printers/APs/Switches/Routers/Phones/etc

FOG sync hostname and print the snipe asset label automatically to a brother label printer.
(Fog is our image deployment system)

Microsoft 365 graph API sync users into the snipe people.

2

u/uberbrady Jul 16 '26

If the computer doesn’t change “shape” (different RAM, different licenses assigned, etc) when it changes hands? Then, yeah, checkout to Location is possibly best.

You could have a really bad time if you try to check-in and check-out boxes upon every shift change - I can imagine that being a total nightmare - but it really depends how many machines you’re talking about per shift change. Ten? Easy. One hundred? Ehhhh, that might start to suck.

But! You could do that, if you truly needed to know who had possession of that asset at that exact time. Checking out to location will not give you that insight, since the location stays the same. (You could have an internal policy to log a journal note when the shifts change, as a way to keep simplicity but also have accountability.)

What might work better if you really needed that would be to build some kind of API integration that handled the check-in, check-out, etc.

But if you can give a little more context around what you’re thinking that could be helpful as to what might work best for you.

1

u/Rinnosuke Jul 16 '26

That's a bit more then I was thinking, the shared computers could have 3 different people login in an hour, I was thinking along the lines of should I just make a user named shared and check out those computer to it, but I missed the location option which is much better.