From time to time we all have these great IT Stories we like to share with our family, friends, and co-workers about our bosses. My own personal experience came almost 4 years ago when I started the job where I work now and my Operations Lead comes to me as says “When you get some time I need you to obtain an inventory of what software that is currently being run on our development Network”. So here I just started and I am now expected to pull an inventory from the preverbal black hole on 80 to 90 Windows and UNIX machines; needless to say I was not completely happy about this. At this point I knew I had only 2 options…
1. Go to every machine physically and look up all the software on each.
2. Consult my Google Crystal Ball and find something a little more automated.
In the end I choose Option 2. Initially I was search for some sort of script that could just pull the info off of all the workstations and dump them into a share folder in .csv format on a server to organize with excel. Upon further research I stumbled across OCS Inventory NG; not only did it do all the things I needed it to do it worked with both Windows and UNIX. Best of all the price tag was right on it as well for my beginning IT Budget at my new job, it was FREE. So to make a long story short I was able to get him a complete list of all software on our development Network at the time a week and half later and now have this Inventory solution deployed on 2 other of my private networks.
The Version of that original management server almost 4 years ago was version 1.3.2 which I had in production until a month ago when I retired that server and replaced it with the current version 2.1 (Now version 2.1.1 is out as of this article).
Over the years I had noted that documentation for OCS Inventory NG was somewhat limited if not downright sparse for Windows Servers and if you did find one it was either in Spanish or French (The developers are from France) or if it was more comprehensive it was on Linux. So after I got through upgrading my current Management Server at work I decided to share my pain with cyber space once again and make a video on my YouTube channel.
This Video goes into the installation and basic configuration of the management server for windows, while the version demonstrated is version 2.1.1 this will work on any management server installation from Version 2.x on up. A part of the basic configuration will involve the security for the management server website and the MySQL database.
Below are some reference links that I mention in my Video…
OCS Inventory NG
