codejanitor

There’s been some delay in getting this out the door, but hopefully the wait is worth it since we have a whole batch of improvements (nearly all of which come from John Schubert). So, what’s new in version 4.4 for OCS Inventory:

• Support for 10.5
• Fixed bug where not having Serial ATA or IDE drives caused the script to die
• Better support for printers
• Hostname can now be set using the hostname or the scutil tool. hostname is the default, but scutil uses the results from the dhcp server which can be better. Which tool is used can be set via the new GETNAME parameter in the ocsinv.conf file
• Two new command line options: -n to force a hostname and -g to force either scutil or hostname to be used
• Support for multiple video cards
• Better detection of whether or not the script is being run by root
• More intelligent way of waiting for the network card to come up before running.

Download it here

If you want to recreate the package yourself (i.e. so you can customize the host file) you can download the source, which can be opened in Package Maker, here

Questions? Check out the forum dedicated to OCS agents here

It’s been awhile, but I’ve finally managed to get the next release of OCS Mac agent out the door. This release owes all its improvements to patches sent in by users — so thank you to all who contributed! What’s new in version 4.3 for OCS Inventory:

• Better handling of foreign characters. By running the output through utf8_decode foreign characters in the descriptions of the inventory are better handled (Nicolas).
• The hostname command now works even if you have fink installed (Tim).
• SATA drives are correctly handled (Josh).
• The output of the MONITORS section now gives more descriptive (Mark).
• Pragma header is fixed which ensures that inventory results are not cached (Nicolas).

Download it here

If you want to recreate the package yourself (i.e. so you can customize the host file) you can download the source, which can be opened in Package Maker, here

Questions? Check out the forum dedicated to OCS agents here

A new version of OCS Mac agent for OCS Inventory has been released. This is a complete rewrite of the agent so that it works with the new OCSInventory-NG. If you are still using OCS Inventory 3.0 you will need to use the old Mac agent.

• This new version is written in PHP which comes with all OSX machines. You don’t need to install any additional software.
• It only works with OSX 10.3+
• To install, just download the DMG file and install the package. If your OCS communication server is named ocsinventory-ng it will work out of the box. If it is named something different you will need to edit the server in /etc/ocsinventory-client/ocsinv.conf
• If you upload the agent to your OCS communication server then the script will upgrade itself whenever a new version is released.

Download it here

If you want to recreate the package yourself (i.e. so you can customize the host file) you can download the source, which can be opened in Package Maker, here

This version fixes the following:

• The samba drive is no longer mounted which fixes a bug where the mounted drive would sometimes show up on the user’s desktop and they would have access to it.
• The domain is detected correctly for Tiger machines.

Download it here

If you want to recreate the package yourself (i.e. so you can customize the samba username and password) you can download the source, which can be opened in Package Maker, here

This version has the following new features:

• Added support for Tiger (OS X 10.4)
• Modems are now discovered correctly.
• Permissions on the package were fixed so it installs correctly.
• The auto-update feature now doesn’t go into an infinite loop if the client clock is off.

Download it here

If you want to recreate the package yourself (i.e. so you can customize the samba username and password) you can download the source, which can be opened in Package Maker, here

This version has the following new features:

• It now works in databases other than MySQL (well, I’ve tested it in Postgresql at least)
• It now can check for a newer version of itself and auto-update itself. This allows it to be updated on a large network very easily

Download it here

UPDATE: Checout a screenshot of the end result here.

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.