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

Updating OCS-NG agents on clients (when needed)


Just like with anything else, we need to check the official website of OCS-NG often. New versions and updates are released from time to time. Generally, these updates are not frequent at all, but when they do happen, we need to know how to approach the process.

The latest Windows agent at the time of writing is 4061.1. The UNIX unified agent is 1.1.2. The method for installing newer agents is similar to the way we could update from earlier versions to the current version. We have two (or more) reasonable options for updates.

There is a widely documented bug with Win32 agent versions lower than 4030. There was no silent uninstall available in those versions. As soon as an update was attempted, the uninstall dialog box would pop up. There is no way to eliminate this, except for automating the user click through the uninstall process (with AutoIt, for example). The agent client versions lower than 4030 date back to early 2007's. Reading this book...