With the increase of software audits for large companies Brooks Institute of Photography (where I work) decided to be proactive and figure out what software we have installed on our 600+ workstations. At first I tried using checkout to do the job, but it just isn’t built to handle licenses very nicely. So after much hunting I discovered a sweet open source inventory agent: OCS Inventory. It’s a mature, stable, full-featured program that handles everything we need (well, almost). What was lacking was a program/agent to collect data from our 300+ Mac OSX machines. As a photography institution we use Macs in all our digital labs. Lucky for us, since OSX is developed on top of *nix it had all the tools we needed to create an agent written in perl (which means it will only work on OSX 10.3+ since 10.3 was the first to have perl installed by default). It actually was far easier than expected because it’s system_profiler program provides nearly all the information we need, such as installed software, memory, cpu, monitors, etc.
Anyhow, we’ve decided to release the agent back to the community so that other mac users can benefit from it. Download it here. Browse the source here.
p.s. It definitely won’t work as a linux agent because of it’s reliance on system_profiler, but it may provide a start for someone who needs a linux agent.