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

As already noted...

[rusty0101]

... a spreadsheet is a lousy way to keep track of this stuff.

It's ok if you are going to do a pure text data entry, but don't store it as a workbook, export it to a cvs file that you can import into a database that you build to handle the things that do not work well in a spreadsheet. You know, things like the photos of the equipment in question.

Spreadsheets also do not handle web access very well. There's two big requirements that are unmet by the spreadsheet method.

You could probably throw together a quick gui in glade or qt to access a posgres, mSQL, mysql, or other database for stuff like this, or throw together a vb interface as well. Nothing wrong with any of that except that on their own they do not meet the web accesability requirement. For that you are probably going to want to use either perl or php.

Nothing radical here, at the same time, nothing really generic enough to be a large enough project for most people to want to use.

Questions to ask are do you want to keep track of purchase date, serial number and prices for warrenty information? Are you going to keep the receipt filed someplace else? What are you going to say when your SO reads that your webcam is stashed under your last girlfriend's bed? Are you going to code remote locations some way different from the closet? How about a storage container, or garrage?

How easy will it be to update? The nic you pulled out of that system you retired a year ago was in the garage under the workbench until you installed it in that system you built for your neighbor last week. Is the database updated with it's new location? Or will you be looking under the workbench next month?

But then you are probably aware of all those questions, so forget I ever asked...

-Rusty

The ideal solution would be...

[darnok]

the mate with a really big, empty garage.

If a bunch of us could cart all our crap over to this hypothetical garage, and we had a gentlemen's agreement between all of us that we were all free to dip in to the big pile at any time for any reason, that would be ideal. I wouldn't particularly mind if someone nabbed one of my 14.4k modems, as long as I was free to nab one of their Soundblaster AWE-64 cards in exchange.

We may need to get a bunch of big boxes and label them "modems", "LAN cards", "memory chips", "sound cards", "power cords" and so on, but that's the limit of the management that would be required.