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Inventorying Miscellaneous Computer Junk?
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."
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.
my wife.
:)
explaining it like "a green thing, with metal on one end, and little things sticking out of the green part" would gets me close to a nic/video/sound card, i can do the rest myself
I use filing cabinets. Each drawer has a label on the front (drives, cables, fans, etc...). Each item goes in the designated drawer when I receive it. Cases go somewhere else.
Throw it all out. You aren't going to use those 256MB hard drives, or the 1MB SIMMs, or that ISA SCSI card that only works with the HP SCSI scanner that only works with that card.
Now I have only to take my own advice. Anyone need a hundred ISA cards? v.32bis modems, AUI NICs, coax repeaters? How about power cords? I have about 50. Phone cords? 10 year old LaserJets with some toner? No?
The latest Slashdot meme.
I don't have that much software, but Openoffice should work. Just a simple spreadsheet.
Myself, I have a metal rack I bought. I keep a few boxes with cables on the middle racks, separated in 3 boxes by power/converters, misc, computer cables. Bottom rack has computer cases, routers. Top rack has HD's, CPU's, add in cards, modems. Works for me. And the rack only cost me 75 bux at the hardware store. Openoffice is free, so was the boxes.
Come to think about it, doing something native in Openoffice would be cool. Maybe use it's mysql db interface with openoffice. Could be quite the little learning experience.
Why not just using openoffice spreadsheet for it ? I mean, if it's just for home, it's all good.
If it would be for a business, a little mysql database with php would still be real simple to implement.
Why must you use modern technology when you have the ancient pen and paper that obviously wasn't enough for a lot of people in the 20th century? Not only are they cheap, but they're y2k compliant and they even work when the power is out! You can't do sorting like you can with a spreadsheet, and formulas would have to be done by hand, but it's a tried and true technology!
*Here's hopin the mods have a sense of humor today.*
"Derp de derp."
I've recently come across a great piece of software that lets you organize your old junk.
TrashCan[tm], made by DumpsterCorp(r), enables you to quickly and easily file away each and every one of those things you think might have some use in the future, but never actually do. Retrieval, unfortunately, is a little bit difficult, but I hear they are working on that.
Marriage[tm], from your friendly neighborhood software house, "Wife, Inc.", also helps you sort your old stuff by using a rule-based decision support system with natural language support:
" IF (you havent needed it for the past 5-10 years)
AND (you dont want me to file for divorce)
THEN (you must get rid of your silly junk)
AND (make room for sissy, pastel-colored baby gear)"
I have found that after using these two great pieces of software to help organize my inventory, I have recovered such an amazing amount of space, it's as if I never had an inventory to begin with!
Why oh why is everyone's first reaction a spreadsheet?
Spreadsheets == handling of numbers
Databases == handling of data
Spreadsheets are not originally designed for searching or indexing. Spreadsheets have no good concept of interrelations.
Use the right tool for the job, for a change.
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.
While this sounds like an interesting project, I feel this is one of those things where a filing cabinet or a chest of drawers or any other combination of cupboards, carboard boxes or cheap plastic containers, a bit of masking tape and a marker pen would probably do a better job.
I'd say most hardware types, myself included because I have this problem, would only keep enough stuff that a bit of organisation would do wonders for.
Get all your ISA cards and put them in one drawer, and label it "ISA Cards". Same for the stack of old IDE hard drives. Repeat until done. What I find handy is to also label each drive with a set of parameters in one uniform place (don't cover the little airhole thingy).
Neaten up the cables you want to keep and wrap them in masking tape. Write the specifications on the tape if you like - "CAT-5, 5M". Put them all into the one drawer/bucket/cupboard.
Making a database or using an application to handle the database sounds like a pretty complex operation, I think it would just be one more thing to worry about. Better to keep your stuff organised logically, which in turn would make you more organised. Adding a database into the equation will just complicate things even more.
Sometimes the low tech fix is the best fix.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
... 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
You never know...
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.
This is directed at the original poster. Since I'm sure he'll read even -1 stuff, mod down all you like. Here goes:
If you have so much excess old hardware that you want to stuff it into some sort of database, and you're not an eBayer or a retailer, you have issues. Big, expensive issues.
And not only because you feel the need to turn to a computer for what could be a very simple solution; two piles. One labeled "stuff I will never use or will likely never use" and one labeled "stuff I might someday use." Feel free to have several boxes! Maybe one is for cables, one is for HDs, one is for FDs, etc.
I've have never engaged in the "this question is too stupid for Slashdot" flamewars but I tell you, I don't mind if I start right now because if any post ever deserved it, it's this one. If you have so much outdated, unmarketable stuff that you need a db, a db isn't your solution. A garage sale or eBay is. If that doesn't work, try the trash.
I'm sure 95% of the replies are going to be in this vein but Christ, I really don't mind driving the point home Just That Little Extra Bit.
My
Limekiller
I'm selling a lot of my old junk on ebay, you should buy it!
it's a sig, wtf?
There have been several suggestions on how to manage the physical side of it. Me, I just put it where I have room for it (and where the wife won't object).
The inventory management, though, is rather easy. Use a wiki! That's what I do.
I have a drawer in my desk for all the small stuff (HD or smaller) and a big box in the attic. Then I use my family's TWiki site to maintain a table of what I have and where it might be -- along with a rather long list of who in and outside my family have which computers, and exactly what's in 'em. This is a good solution as long as you are certain that everyone who meddles with those computers also update the listing (and, sadly, nobody but myself is doing the meddling).
* Accessible from any networked computer: check.
* Ability to add any number of notes and attachments: check.
* Scalability in terms of users and inventory stock: check.
* Ease of maintenance: Easy.
* Ease of setup/installation: Moderate; easy if you know your way around a web server.
Anything I forgot?
"Good news, everyone!"
You could write a nice little product for the Plone web-system, using the 'Archetypes' framework, to do this.
:)
* A web-browser-based system (or something else with LAN connectivity) that would allow me to access the inventory from multiple computers
- plone works through the web, so thats no prob.
* Something to indicate where each part is, i.e. "under bed" or "behind bookshelf"
- you just define your Archetype with 'location' as a field - it can either be a free text field or you could make it a choice of items.
* A way to attach one or more photos to each item
- that's just an Image field in the Archetype.
* Category organization, like "hard drives," "memory," or "cables". Subcategories would be nice too.
- that's another simple 'choice' type field.
* A "notes" field for each item, to save misc. information.
- a text field - do you want structured text, plain html, ReStructured text, or uploaded files? Easy.
* Search functionality, so I could search by category or text-search any field.
- plone catalogs the content and there's a search box.
With Plone and Archetypes, all the forms for editing and adding content are built for you. You can use the default view, or write your own view templates.
www.plone.org for all your plone needs. Python skills useful.
Baz
While a lot of folk might suggest a database, structuring data is difficult, especially when you're spanning the gamut from "bits of green wire" to "Cray XMP, Serial no 700l33t4u", with and without photos, etc.
A simpler, scalable solution is to see all of this stuff as semistructured or even unstructured data - and point a search engine at it. (lots of people are heading this way - see eg ReiserFS, WinFS.
To create your data, just make web pages and get the search engine to index them. You can even make the whole process very simple by using a Wiki with built in full text search like MoinMoin, or just go for a proper search engine like lucene/
There are disadvantages. In the most basic setup you will not be able to search for "green things" because until you move from unstructured to semistructured data, there are no properties for the search engine to pick on. Even once you do add properties, you won't be able to ask "add up the cost of all my junk" which is easy in SQL. But the speed at which you can add stuff to your inventory is some compensation.
This isn't your wife you're talking to. We're all geeks here and we know that 3/4 of that stuff you're keeping 'just in case'.
;-)
The first step is admitting you have a problem.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
There are good power cords (12ga and heavier; 12ga extenders; anything 3m and longer; anything 50cm and shorter; the IBM power cables that don't block the plug; right angle connectors) and then there are the run-of-the-mill crap you get with everything you buy -- 16 or 18 guage, between 1.5 and 2 meters long)
If you buy a rack from Sun, it comes with power in it... but they insist on sending you one or two power cables for each item that goes in it. So you buy a 36U rack, you're probably going to be getting 18+ power cables along with it. The only good thing is, copper can be sold for scrap -- cut the ends off first, and you'll get a slightly better price per pound.
But make sure to save the extenders -- They come in damned handy when you have to rearrange a rack to compress down space, and your management won't approve downtime. With two good extenders, a machine lift, and a system with multiple power taps, [not redundant power supplies -- redundant power taps -- the sun x000 and x500 series sucks for that], and a spare 50' ethernet cable, you can move quite far, just have to keep moving the power connections. [if it's got a SCSI disk pack attached, well, you can still slide stuff up/down in the rack]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Get married. She'll tell you what to do with it all.
Like everybody else, I've accumulated a lot of random old computer hardware (Yes, I really do need those old ISA video cards. I've also decided that if left in the same box long enough cards breed. I now have 3 original SoundBlaster Live! cards when I've only bought one).
Last summer I went to California for 8 months to intern. While I was gone, my father inventoried all my old hardware for me. Sent me spreadsheets full of listed items so I could decide what to keep, what to sell, and what to donate. All the things he couldn't identify he spread out on the floor and sent digital photos of. I'd load them up in The Gimp, draw a red X on top of each thing to get rid of, and mail it back.
Then he eBayed all the extra stuff and sent me the money. All the stuff I decided to keep he placed in neatly labeled Tupperware boxes in my closet, with all the cords velcro-strapped and sorted into ziplock bags.
However, he did manage to take back all the hardware I've "borrowed" from him over the last 22 years...
http://chrismetcalf.net