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

Setting up the OCS-NG management server on Linux operating systems


Before we begin, let's initiate a terminal session at the Linux server. This is going to be the server on which we will install the OCS-NG server. It is recommended to start an encrypted shell such as SSH. You may even work locally on the server, if possible.

We are going to look into two individual ways of installing the OCS-NG management server. You may pick either. The first installation modality will be via RPMs. Ever since OCS-NG has become popular and recognized in the open source community, several Linux distributions have started to include it into their package repository. The advantage of this is that they are officially supported, fully maintained, and kind of guaranteed to work.

While installing software, when there's an RPM, it takes barely one line of command, and the process is fully automated. The second modality that we will cover is slightly longer, as the user is required to download and extract the latest...