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 fulfills inventorying necessities of the real world, then this is the book for you.
A practical guide on how to set up, configure, and work with OCS Inventory NG—a cross-platform, open source inventory solution.
Chapter 1, Introduction to IT Inventory and Resource Management presents the importance of IT inventory within any organization or company. It describes some of the must-have features that an automated and centralized solution should provide. OCS Inventory NG comes into the picture saving the day and selecting many of those checkboxes.
Chapter 2, Setting up an OCS Inventory NG Management Server explains the server role requirements of an OCS-NG management server and leads the user through the steps of setting up the requisite software on the chosen platform. Once the system is ready, OCS-NG is installed and configured to collaborate with the agents that will soon be deployed.
Chapter 3, The Zen of Agent Deployment helps you understand the types of agents and the various ways agents can be deployed on client machines. This chapter presents operating system-specific strategies to automate the deployment of agents. Additional components that are required are thoroughly explained.
Chapter 4, Finding your Way through OCS-NG Features exposes the diversified features that OCS-NG sports and gives a rundown on each of them. From this chapter, you will learn how gathering from clients happens, how to sort the results, and accomplish all kinds of administrative tasks with the fresh inventory database.
Chapter 5, Investigating the Process of Gathering Inventory Data goes further beyond the actual mechanism of retrieving information and focuses on how to optimize and tweak this process as well as find leakages. Administrators can determine which devices are inventoried, how frequently they are inventoried, locate hosts that are not inventoried, and resolve synchronization issues.
Chapter 6, Package Deployment through OCS-NG takes a practical look at package deployment and command execution functionalities on inventoried clients. These increase the usefulness of our centralized inventory suite. This chapter opens to view the different ways in which you can do this as well as how to specify on which clients this can be done.
Chapter 7, Integrating OCS-NG with GLPI adds the icing on the cake by introducing integration possibilities with other tools. This chapter gives you the edge by explaining how GLPI empowers our OCS-NG inventory. Opting for GLPI on top of OCS-NG is akin to functionalities on steroids, and you will learn how to make it work.
Chapter 8, Best Practices on Inventorying with OCS-NG deals with all-around repetitive tasks related to IT inventories and management needs and how to get them solved with our setup. This chapter deals with some best practices and other tips of backing up the database. It also deals with everyday situations that can happen and need to be resolved seamlessly.
Chapter 9, Troubleshoot Confidently—Find Solutions and Workarounds continues the string of practical tips and tricks and good-to-know strategies. This chapter covers identifying issues, diagnosing common problems, troubleshooting them, and finding solutions for them.
Appendix, Keeping Pace with Version Updates—Glancing over the changelog of the Latest Release gives a brief overview on how to read changelogs, explains us what they are, and why they are useful to us. Their relevancy is quite high as every open source project has a changelog.
OCS Inventory NG runs on top of the popular Apache web server, using MySQL's InnoDB engine and the PHP server-side scripting language. In order to install the OCS-NG management server, the system must have these prerequisites installed and configured.
There is an integrated pack that sets up all of the components we must have for a fully functional web server. This package is available for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X operating systems. It's called XAMPP. The developers of OCS-NG thought about making the process seamless on Windows machines. The Win32 installation kit of OCS-NG includes this integrated pack and sets up the prerequisites during the setup process.
The OCS Inventory NG management server consists of the following four server roles:
Database server: It requires MySQL 4.1 or a higher version that uses the InnoDB engine
Communication server: It requires Apache web server 1.3 or higher and some Perl modules (which we are going to present in a minute)
Deployment server: It requires any web server (Apache works here too)
Administration console: It needs Apache Web Server, PHP 4.3 or higher, and some additional ZIP and GD support
Apart from those main server components, the following modules are necessary:
Apache server needs to be 1.3.X, 2.0.X+ with the following modules:
Mod_perl version 1.29+
Mod_php version 4.3.2+
PHP 4.3.2+ with extensions:
ZIP library of ZIP file functions and support
GD library of image functions
PERL 5.6+ with the following modules:
XML::Simple version 2.12+
Compress::Zlib version 1.33+
DBI version 1.40+
DBD::MySQL version 2.9004+
Apache::DBI version 0.93
Net::IP version 1.21+
SOAP::Lite version 0.66+
MySQL 4.1+ with following engine:
InnoDB
Any sort of make utility to control the generation of executables and similar important files from an application's source code files
For example: GNU make.
The book targets an audience of system administrators and IT professionals who are required to implement, configure, customize, and work with IT inventory and asset management solutions.
The book does not presume any prior knowledge of inventory management. It only requires a solid grasp of the client-server model and familiarity with the chosen operating system along with the necessary web server and database server terminologies. Anyone with an interest in inventorying IT assets and solving real-world resource management dilemmas will enjoy this book.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "For example, installing a package is done by typing yum install package-name."
A block of code is set as follows:
memory_limit = 96M post_max_size = 64M upload_max_filesize = 64M
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."
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