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

Deploying agents on Linux operating systems


Installing the agent on Linux operating systems can be done locally. Should we have an already implemented remote execution solution on those machines, we can use them. Either way, if we are performing the installation locally, we also have two possibilities. We have an interactive setup and an automated and unattended setup without user interaction.

The chances are that we can find ocsinventory-agent in our distribution's software repository. If we prefer that the installation be lead by the software package manager, then we can first verify whether the agent exists, and if so, what kind of version it is.

By now, we should be familiar with our distribution's package manager:

  • Installing OCS Inventory NG agent with YUM:

    yum install ocsinventory-agent
    
    
  • Installing OCS Inventory NG Agent with APT-GET:

    apt-get install ocsinventory-agent
    
    

If we cannot find the ocsinventory-agent package, we can try ocsinventory-client.

There is no real advantage of...