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

Troubleshooting problems related to agents


As mentioned earlier, quite often, there are connection-related issues, for example, the agent cannot establish a connection with the OCS-NG server. This can happen because of various reasons. First, there is a proxy required, and the agent is launched with the /NP parameter; thus, it sets "no proxy" mode and fails the connection. Linux agents have the -NP parameter.

By default, the agent retrieves the proxy address set in Internet Explorer (IE) under Windows. This means that if there is a required proxy to go outside and surf the Net, but that proxy is not required to reach the internal OCS-NG communication server, which is within the intranet, then the agent will fail again. In this situation, we need to specify the /NP switch to disable proxy detection. It ignores the one set in IE and things will work.

In the situations we just discussed, the connection times out as the destination is unreachable. Based on our network topologies, we must know...