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

Creating a package: Step-by-step approach


In this section, we will present a few steps through which we create a package. The Package builder can be found under the Deployment menu on the yellow action bar. The first option from the drop-down menu is called Build. It loads up the Package builder, as shown in the following screenshot:

Each package needs to have a Name. This is for identification purposes so that later on we can recognize the package we are referring to and working with. Let's not forget to enter something relevant to the package we are planning to deploy. The Operating system must also be specified: WINDOWS or Unix/Linux. Now, the only supported Protocol is the HTTP. Future development might expand the range of protocol support.

The Priority can be set from 0-10, and it works as explained earlier. Next to the File field, we have the Browse button. Using this button, we need to point to the archive we want to deploy. In the Action field, we can choose from the three previously...