Book Image

IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02

Book Image

IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02

Overview of this book

OCS Inventory NG is a cross-platform, open-source inventory and asset management solution. It brings more than plentiful features to the table to satisfy the business needs of small-to-large organizations with up to tens of thousands of computers. However, to put this inventory solution to optimum use requires a lot of skill.This book will lead you through the steps of implementing OCS-NG until you master working with it. This book aims at reducing efforts involved in resource management. The solution gives a robust foundation on top of which we can implement other third party applications, plugins, and much more.This book begins with the basics—it explains what IT inventorying needs are to be met in the real-world. Then, it covers a step-by-step approach to everything you need to know to set up and implement OCS-NG as a centralized inventory solution to meet all these requirements. It delves deeper into carrying out inventory tasks with every chapter.You will learn how to choose the best agent type and deployment method. We discuss the process of gathering inventory data and cover techniques for creating and deploying packages. You will also learn how to acquire added benefits with the use of plugins. We discuss best practices on inventorying and troubleshooting agent-related problems. The book presents real-world inventorying scenarios along with their solutions. You will basically learn how to use OCS-NG to get the most out of it.As a conclusion, if you want to learn about a free solution that fulfils inventorying necessities of the real-world, this is the book for you.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface
Keeping Pace with Version Updates—Glancing over the changelog of the Latest Release

Installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl on Linux systems


We want to install Apache, MySQL, and PHP/PERL (also known as AMP solution stack) on our Linux system as our OCS-NG inventory is going to run on top of these. Apache is the web server daemon, and it's going to provide a web-based user interface for us too. MySQL will serve database requests, and it's the heart of the inventory after all. In order to provide dynamic content, we also need PHP and Perl interpreters.

After having learnt how to use package managers of various Linux distributions, let's put our knowledge to some practical use. We will focus on yum, then APT, and finally emerge.

Installing the AMP stack with yum

First things first, we can install all packages with one simple command line as follows:

# yum -y install httpd php mysql mysql-server php-mysql

Now that we have these basic packages installed, we can check whether there are updates available for them by using the yum check-update httpd command In order to find out...