Automated inventory software for Macs?

Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
anyone know of any? we're looking to put something in place for a few thousand machines, but i'd like to be able to recommend software that will work on Macs and PC's, as well as Unix and Linux boxes if possible.



you guys have any experience with products that fit the bill?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    gargoylegargoyle Posts: 660member
    hmmm, sounds like a nice iccle project to get me started with "proper" programming again. What sort of things would you like this software to perform ?
  • Reply 2 of 4
    alcimedesalcimedes Posts: 5,486member
    well, this will be a long list, but i'll start at the top.



    we want IP's, OS version, Software installed, any hardware info we can gather (such as chip speed, RAM, HD size, MAC address, CD-ROM/DVD drive) to be gathered, remotely and preferably automaticlly.



    if that's not enough, then we want the gathered data to be exportable to some database format, such as CSV. after that we'll import it into a huge SQL database.



    as it stands now i've found a lot of programs that can do all of this for the PC's, but nothing that will do it for the Macs.



    if you developed something, and it works, there's an excellent chance our University would be willing to pay for it.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Whew... that's a lot of work.



    <wet blanket mode>

    It seems that this info will be next to impossible to progromatically querry. You would need passwords for each machine and then specialized code depending on the OS it is running. Even then, the time spent automating this might not be worth it. While, nearly anything is technically possible from a programming standpoint, many things take too long to code and verify.



    I suspect it would cost more to write the software to do this then it would cost to pay minimum-wage undergraduates to walk around campus entering data into a laptop.

    </wet blanket mode>



    Sorry for the negative vibes man.

  • Reply 4 of 4
    gspottergspotter Posts: 342member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by alcimedes

    you guys have any experience with products that fit the bill?



    Not with mac software, but I'm currently in a similar situation (but I need Solaris and AIX compatible software).



    I know someone who uses cfg2html to monitor a HP/UX server farm. There's no MacOS X version yet, but I assume an admin should be able to adapt the scripts.



    If I remember correctly, the scripts are run every night via a cron job and the output files are then ftp'ed to a central webserver.
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