There’s a big push here at work to maintain central records of all our machines. The fact we have umpteen thousand, mostly purchased individually to a variety of specifications from a variety of grants by a plethora of Academics, makes it very hard indeed
We insist that Windows machines are part of our active directory infrastructure and part of that is a policy to regularly run Everest, a hardware/software auditing program. This data is linked up with other available information to provide a complete picture of machines connected to our network - as long as they are running Windows.
I did a bit of work last week (don’t faint from shock) taking a small perl script written by one department for Mac OSX 10.3 and extending it to compile simple audit information for any version of OSX and log it to a central windows share. Unlike Windows we don’t automate the running of this script, because we don’t have a centralised Mac infrastructure - Yet
In contrast, we do have a somewhat centralised Linux infrastructure and it’s my baby. So I’ve spent a little time thinking about the problem of maintaining a complete machine database and come up with the following ideas:
I settled on [2] because up2date is written in Python, an evil language. Once I’d found that lshw outputs some nicely formed XML, I simply took some perl and glued together the lshw hardware output with an XML representation of the RPM database and some basic user stats. I’m then checking a webpage for the location of the audit upload page and uploading a file to that page.
This approach leaves me with three things:
So now I just have to work on further storage and processing of the audit. For this I will be using PHP5 and its SimpleXML methods and extensions, because that is an easy method of turning XML into a PHP object. I’ll probably be placing this all in a database as well.
And this is all just as a side-project… I have a real job to do.