Inventorying Miscellaneous Computer Junk?

drewhearle writes "I'm sure lots of Slashdot readers act as technical support to friends and family. I do a lot of this myself and have collected all sorts of miscellaneous computer hardware over the years, such as cases, power supplies, older memory, hard drives, cables and the like. If you're like me, you have to dig through everything and look in various closets, drawers and boxes whenever you need something. What do you use for keeping track of your inventory? Is there a full-featured open-source or freeware package out there that actually works?" Read more for what he's looking for -- sounds like a useful niche.

drewhearle continues "Ideally I'd like an open-source solution with the following features:

A web-browser-based system (or something else with LAN connectivity) that would allow me to access the inventory from multiple computers

Something to indicate where each part is, i.e. "under bed" or "behind bookshelf" :)

A way to attach one or more photos to each item

Category organization, like "hard drives," "memory," or "cables". Subcategories would be nice too.

A "notes" field for each item, to save misc. information

Search functionality, so I could search by category or text-search any field.

I'm probably asking too much, but if there isn't [widely available] software out there like this, maybe somebody has developed something similar for themselves and would be willing to share."

Comments

First Post

[AntiGenX]

I call what you're looking for a spreadsheet. A small database will work if you need more complexity.

Not to sound snide or anything... It's just, if you are a geek, then you should know how to work one of those thing-a-mabobs.

Check SourceForge

[christopherfinke]

Upon searching SourceForge for "inventory", 4 out of the top 5 matches appear to do what you want. I didn't check them all real close, but none of them appear to have the ease of use that they should, but here's what I'm thinking:

This wouldn't be all that hard to put together with PHP and MySQL, and I've got a lot of code laying around that could be reused to put this together pretty quickly. Anyone want to help with development? Contact "chris at efinke dot com" to pitch in.

Re:Why spreadsheets?

[baywulf]

Here are some reasons people use a spreadsheet:

* There are no complex interrelations to the data. Not complex enough to normalize. Maybe just a bunch of key/attribute relationships.

* Many databases are client/server with a server always running in the background. Why run yet another service when you do something infrequently.

* The user interfaces to many databases are not user friendly. Spreadsheet allow for ease of entry without any coding. Many will auto-expand what you type with similar text above it. Many will provide pulldown menus to do basic queries.