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

Getting familiar with the OCS-NG web interface


Fire up your favorite web browser and point it to the following URL of the OCS-NG server:

http://<ocs-servername>/ocsreports

If we are accessing the OCS-NG web interface from the same machine from where the server daemon is run, we can access the administration console using the localhost instead of using the ocs-servername in the hyperlink syntax previously mentioned. Otherwise, the hostname gets resolved. We can also opt for the IP address of the server instead of hostnames.

Logging in

The login screen will pop up. It will ask for the User and Password. By default, there is only one predefined user who has administrative privileges. The username is admin and the password is also admin. Type these into the empty text fields and log in.

The password of the predefined admin user can be changed, but that is not what we're going to do. Soon, we will deal with some preliminary configurations, and learn how to set up new users. Next, we can...