Slashdot Mirror

ocsng + glpi

GLPI: Free IT And Asset Management Software.

OCS Inventory is a database and reporting interface that will keep an up-to-date database of the devices on your network(s). It's got a server component that runs on Linux or Windows (Linux is recommended) and client agents that run on Windows, *nix, and MacOS X. The client agents also use nmap to scan for other types of nodes, such as routers and printers. It's very slick; I've used it for six years for my job, and we currently track over 500 computers plus a few other devices through nmap.

The whole thing is GPL, and you can opt for a support contract.

It can also integrate with another package called GLPI, which among other things handles trouble tickets and is also Free.

GLPI, works well for us, and it's GPL, what more can you ask ?

Also integrates well with Microsoft Active Directory. I'm building GLPI out for 30 Facilities in North America with will encompass thousands of PC's; currently two fully integrated, and 5 others at a useful state. OCS coupled with GLPI makes inventory automatic. I set it up so that OCS-NG scanner is installed via Group Policy when computer joins domain.

Down side; GLPI is easy to install, but harder to setup I've changed config options at least three times to get where I'm at.

I would do it all again, but there might be other options with better features.

http://www.glpi-project.org/?lang=en

This might be the sort of thing, coupled with the OCNS agent it'll scan your network and log all the data into a myql database. Ticket system which allows users to report stuff attached to an asset, reporting, contracts, and stuff. Worth a look.

It would really depend on your site requirements -- namely, what you want to track, how to correlate said info, etc.

You might want to check out GLPI. It covers the basics that most inventory management software does. The documentation is a bit lacking / confusing, but there're enough users out there who can help. It's pretty flexible, too, but seeing that the OP mentioned isn't a web coder, that's not as good a selling point.

On another note, I'd recommend searching SourceForge and Freshmeat for "inventory." It might just so happen that someone's written it in such a way that fits your needs. In my experience, every organization has always had something slightly different, where one works better than the other.

We've been using GLPI for several years now. It's web-based, customizable to a fair degree, and free.

Can be found here.

This might be the sort of thing, coupled with the OCNS agent it'll scan your network and log all the data into a myql database. Ticket system which allows users to report stuff attached to an asset, reporting, contracts, and stuff. Worth a look.

I work as a network manager in a school in the UK. We use a French Helpdesk system called GLPI. We also use OCS Inventory as recommended to populate the database with our hardware. Overall the solution has a few minor quirks, but if teachers can cope with it I don't understand why office drones can't!

For this exact reason I'm switching my Active Directory Group Policies to use wpkg in combination with OCS Inventory NG (or maybe GLPI, I'm just starting my research on migrating).

With WPKG you aren't constrained to MSI packages, you can distribute and manage ANY package. With the latest IE security flaw fiasco it got me looking at how to deploy Firefox. This seems to be the best way and should actually make my maintenance jobs much easier.

I've looked at wpkg a few times in the past, but there was a lot of overhead getting the system setup, and adding/deploying new packages. I wouldn't mind a system like that, but I work with several admins that are "Windows Admins". They don't want to deal with anything that isn't point-and-click.

But at work, people are still stuck with Microsoft shit. Why? Mozilla still hasn't released an MSI of Firefox.

I admin servers for several companies. If I could simply push out a copy of Firefox using Group Policy, I would give firefox about 250 additional users first thing tomorrow morning.

For this exact reason I'm switching my Active Directory Group Policies to use wpkg in combination with OCS Inventory NG (or maybe GLPI, I'm just starting my research on migrating).

With WPKG you aren't constrained to MSI packages, you can distribute and manage ANY package. With the latest IE security flaw fiasco it got me looking at how to deploy Firefox. This seems to be the best way and should actually make my maintenance jobs much easier.

http://glpi-project.org/

GLPI http://www.glpi-project.org/?lang=en is worth a look.

It's LAMP-based and does inventory tracking too. It supports user-submitted tickets and has a rudimentary concept of service levels/escalation. Reporting needs some work, but you can always use third party tools for this.

... http://otrs.org/ for ticketing, http://ocsinventory.sourceforge.net/ for hardware tracking and http://glpi-project.org/?lang=en for software license tracking.

The ticketing and asset pieces aren't integrated and you might be able to get GLPI and OCS to work with a barcode scanner if the scanner will dump to a text field in the web page. I haven't had your specific needs but I thought I'd tout what worked for me, since I haven't seen them mentioned.

At my organisation, we went with two open source projects,OCS NG and GLPI. OCS NG is a client-server solution that uses a client, written in php, but compiled as an exe installer and running as a service on Windows (There's also clients available for Solaris, Linus and OSX), that collects information on hardware and software from the client computer (the source is avaiulable and you can edit it if you want). The OCS NG server collects the data from the clients via an xml-rpc call and sorts and stores them (you can delete clients, filter software into categories etc). The GLPI server is the main helpdesk and tracking app. It works hand-in-hand with the OCS NG server and is really good, and provides detailed data on clients, plus the ability to do financial info on them and reporting.

We have both running on a gentoo server and the level of control is excellent.

The downside is that both are from France. The English translation is less than perfect (but we're in switzerland and so we use it in French). I can only recommed the software though. No licensing issues or huge costs from proprietry vendors adn the ability to modify the source code is a god send. We modified GLPI to print labels via an xsl transform of the xml output to xslfo for Apache's FOP.

We found GLPI, a fork of IRM, to be much more flexible and useful. It's not very polished, but it's got a very solid base and our small office (200 desktops) used it with great success.