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

Preliminary configuration tips and best practices


The first and foremost best configuration practice is to get rid of the default admin account. This is something that is generally applicable everywhere. The problem is that everyone knows the default account password, so if we don't change it, let alone delete the account altogether, some malicious users could get access to our database. The following screenshot shows the Add a new user function:

We navigate to the Users icon on the administrative toolbar. Then we add a new User. At first we should add an Administrator. Once this is done, we can specify many other users with either User or Local user privileges. The difference between User and Local user is that the latter is limited to viewing only particular TAG-based hosts (if this feature is activated, of course). Moreover, the User has global viewing rights to the database.

If we use TAGs to delimit separate locations of the company, then this function makes sense.

Explaining configuration...