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

Uploading inventory data of hosts that are not networked


It might not seem that probable, but actually there are some hosts that might not be always connected to the network. There are various valid reasons for that. In the previous chapter, we covered how to set up and run an agent locally on hosts that are not networked.

The only drawback of this situation is that we need to import the inventory file manually. This file has the .ocs extension and has the following syntax: COMPNAME-2009-12-03-05-04-03.ocs. There are two methods which could be used to import this file. The first method is using the OCS web interface. The administrator logs in, selects the Local import function (11th of the 12 icons on the yellow toolbar), and browses for the path of the file. After clicking Send, it gets imported.

The Local import function is shown in the next screenshot:

When dealing with routine administrative tasks manually, the thought of automating and scheduling the tasks comes to the mind of every system...