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

Securing the process with SSL certificates


Now, we will cover the internal working of SSL certificates. As explained earlier, these are required as they enhance the security of deployment. Those info XML files are grabbed through HTTP over SSL protocol. We have two options to set up such a necessary SSL system.

Either we are going to work with self-signed certificates, or we opt for a more refined solution via the typical Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) scheme, having the certificate signed by a certificate authority (CA). In the very essence, the public key is linked with an identity. After that, anyone can verify whether that key really belongs to that identity. Therefore, it acts as a digital signature.

Describing in detail how the PKI scheme works is beyond the scope of our book. Chances are if you want to opt for the second methodology (that is having signed the certificates by a CA), then you either have an internal PKI or, you may have got yours issued by a commercial signer such as...