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 to know the package deployment function


It should not surprise anyone that in this chapter, we are also going to spend most of our time using the web administration console of OCS-NG. For the first step, we need to fire up our browser and log in to the web interface. In Chapter 4, Finding your Way through OCS-NG Features, we read a rundown on each function of OCS-NG, and we presented glimpses of the package deployment menu.

It is located as the first icon of the yellow action bar. It is called Deployment, and we have three options under this drop-down menu. Their names are self-explanatory; the Build option deals with building a package, the Activate option manages the activation of those already existing packages (if there are any), and with the final option, we can set up, modify, and remove Rules of affectation.

Here's a screenshot of the Deployment menu:

What happens behind the scenes when a package is about to be deployed? Firstly, when we create the package, it is stored on...