I do not think I know of one
administrator that enjoys the task of
keeping the inventory of who has what on their computer. It is for this
very reason that lots of companies have made lots of money selling
software solutions that help you to manage this. Now I hate paying
money (I can think of so many other things I would rather do with it),
so I have always tried to come up with other ways to accomplish this.
There are free utilities that do audits, and through some heavy
scripting and general messing around, I have always managed to keep
track of whats where - but it was never pretty. So always on the look
out for something nice to impress management with, I was very happy to
find the new OCSInventoryNG (homepage here). A very nice program, free,
runs on linux, has multiple agents, scriptable and looks pretty. What
more could I ask for?
What is needed? Big things first, you need a linux
box with apache, mysql and perl on
it. You then download the OCSNG linux server source code from the
projects site. Then there are a couple of perl modules which are
required...
tar -xvzf OCSNG_LINUX_SERVER_1.0RC3-1.tar.gz
cd OCSNG_LINUX_SERVER_1.0RC3-1
./setup.sh
Running the setup.sh script
triggers a whole bunch of questions, most
of them are fine if you go with the default option, the one thing you
must get right is your web servers document root. Anyway once you have
finished this process, you need to restart your apache server and point
a web browser to http://<server>/ocsreports. Once you go there it
will ask you for the mysql server it can use, and then the username and
password that can be used to work with the mysql server. You put that
in and it then does it's thing. You may get an error about upload sizes
and stuff, just edit your php.ini file and change the post_max_size and
upload_max_filesize settings, I generally use 28M. Once the web based
setup steps are done, going to http://<server>/ocsreports now
presents you with your audit result management page. Many of the
options are self-explanatory, but I still recommend reading the
documentation.
Getting audit
results Like I mentioned earlier there are
many different agents, the two official ones are for windows and linux,
but there is an unsupported agent for MacOSX. Lets start with the
windows agent;
Download it from the homepage
In the archive is the ocslogon.exe
file
Copy this to a folder where your logon scripts run from
Rename the file to the IP address
of the ocsinventory server, for example - 192.168.0.45.exe
Add the following to your logon
scripts - @\\server\netlogon\192.168.0.45.exe
/deploy:4026 /np
The linux agent is just as easy;
Download it from the homepage
Unextract it - tar -xzvf
OCSNG_LINUX_AGENT_1.0RC3.tar.gz
cd OCSNG_LINUX_AGENT_1.0RC3
chmod 700 ./setup.sh
./setup.sh
<answer questions>
Thats it. Give it a day or two to
get all your clients to logon and update their details, then go to http://<server>/ocsreports
and find out just what is
out there.
Final Words
All jokes aside, having an inventory of whats on your network and who
has what installed is an immensely important resource for an IT
administrator, and the OCSNG
inventory package makes it a fairly easy thing to accomplish.
Like all good open-source projects there is a lot more you can do with
it, for example you can deploy packages using it - thats cool. So play
around and as always learn and have fun.