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

A pragmatic look at initial configuration


Arriving at this stage means that we have installed the OCS-NG management server. If we had chosen to install the server on Linux, then we would need to fire up our favorite browser and visit the following link. On Windows installations, a new browser is redirected to the following URL:

http://localhost/ocsreports/install.php

This is when we need to specify the MySQL database log in information for our inventory solution. This is important as it must be able to communicate with the database. The user must have the eligible rights to create databases and tables. Under normal circumstances, this user is root. The password is the one we specified earlier. Hostname is localhost, if the MySQL server runs on the same machine as the OCS-NG server (like we did).

This step creates a new database called ocsweb, and a new MySQL user ocs with password ocs. The database schema is created according to the specifications OCS-NG is able to work with. It is he user...