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 central server (when needed)


OCS Inventory NG is a healthy project that is still supported and has a dedicated small team of developers behind it. While updates are not that frequent, this doesn't mean that there are no updates. There are rarely major updates concerning the OCS management server or communication server. However, when that happens, we need to know how to install the update.

First of all, let's consider a safety tip. We need to back up our database. Yes, back it up! NOW! Read that sentence again. This is crucial as newer updates always bring a little bit of schema update and change the structure of our OCS database (ocsweb, in our case). The steps for backing up the database were explained at the beginning of this chapter.

Moving on, we download the latest OCS-NG central server archive and extract it into the /var/www/ocsreports/ folder depending on our configuration (or \xampp\ocsreports\). We overwrite our files and move on. From this step, there are two little...