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

Managing the rules of affectations


The rules of affectations deal with automatic affectation of packages. These are useful in the case of redistribution servers when we opt for a distributed OCS-NG inventory setup, but there might be exceptions to this. This is the third option of the Deployment menu (first icon of the yellow admin toolbar). By default, there is no rule. It is shown in the following screenshot:

Should we want to add a rule, the interface is intuitive. Each rule needs to have a priority. This benefits scenarios in which multiple rules are meant to be implemented. Under most circumstances, the syntax of an affectation rule is: if MACHINE VALUE equals ''='', does not equal "<>", or is LIKE, SERVER VALUE, both the MACHINE VALUE and SERVER VALUE can have one of the following options: NAME, @IP, IPSUBNET, DOMAIN, and USER.

The next screenshot shows how to define an affectation rule:

Setting up more than one redistribution server might require rules of affectations. Imagine...