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

Backing up and restoring the OCS-NG database


Each time we deal with data, experience has taught us that we can't underestimate the slight chances of hardware failover or any other sort of "all hell breaks loose" events. In database administration, our data is organized into tables. Everyone knows that the content of these tables can be dumped. Dumping is a technical term and in plain and simple English it means "exporting" the data into a file.

This exported file can be saved and stored at some safe place. It is generally advisable to store these important backups at a remote location. Many companies exchange backups between locations (if they have more than one) or pay for an expert service that does this for them. The key is to have the backed up drives (or tapes) stored at a different location, that is, by common sense, somewhat safe from natural catastrophes.

Of course, these are general backup guidelines as the OCS-NG database is not that crucial compared to the other services a company...