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

Using the IP Query function


Assuming we have installed the OCS-NG server on a Linux distribution, we might also have the third option of the Security menu. This tool scans a manually specified host for a rather exhaustive list of details. It can also find out if the host was inventoried and/or just discovered. It determines the operating system (if available), DNS, and NetBIOS name.

The web interface of IP Query is basically a frontend to the IPDISCOVER-UTIL Perl script. That is why it is only available on Linux machines due to the Perl interpreter. Of course, there are workarounds for this too. It is based on the world-class security scanner and notorious penetration testing/security auditing tool, nmap. You can find more information about nmap from the following link:

http://nmap.org/

Alright, so we know that the heart of the IP Query function is nmap, but it has a few other requisite components as well, which are as follows:

  • nmblookup (part of the samba suite, tested on 3.0.7/3.0.10...