General &Programming DAH on 10 Jul 2007 08:20 pm
Open-AudIT
Today I stayed after work for a little while and setup a pretty cool network inventory software – Open-AudIT. Since this involved a decent amount of siting around and waiting / configuring, it also afforded me some time to wait for some calls to get returned from work contacts on the PST clock, which wasn’t all that bad.
Open-AudIT is a network inventory system, meaning that it provides a nice categorical list of all the hardware and software connected to your network. Assuming windows pcs and servers, it can take advantage of WMI to scan all this information from one central location, meaning no intrusion of installing software everywhere. Why?
- Search for a specific application (and version) and find where it is installed
- track license keys for software, and see what computers are using them
- see hardware info on all computers (ok, which servers have 4 gig of ram?)
I haven’t spent much time playing with it yet, but it is pretty cool so far. I also discovered a cool thing while setting this up. We have a virtual server at work (2 actually) meaning that we can emulate a whole computer with just a ‘file’. This came in quite handy, because all it took to install this as a test, was to make a ‘dif’ off of an existing virtual machine – this way i don’t run the risk of ruining any existing servers when i just want to test (think sandbox). This first step took all of 10 minutes. Then i was a little bummed because I had to setup a whole LAMP stack (actually WAMP, since this was on windows) – untill i found this project on sourceforge: XAMPP. This was the cool thing. It only took about 30 minutes to download, install, and reboot this thing. and it was bascially all configured for me out of the box. Downloading, installing, and configuring each of these would have been quite a chore – not hard – just time consuming. Many linux distros have LAMP installation options out of the box, but I was supprised to find something like it for the windows platform (they have it for mac and linux as well).
Today I also decided to dig my trumpet out of its case and give it a practice. It felt good to play, even though I couldn’t last very long. I don’t know when I last played, but it was probably over a year ago. Crazy – It takes me back to high school practicing in my room at home. odd how memories are triggered like that.
on 11 Jul 2007 at 8:35 am 1.Megan said …
Well since sadly I understood maybe 10% of your post (on a good day:) I don’t have much to say except it sounds like you are being productive and talented and all that jazz:) And I think it’s fun that you are playing the trumpet next time I see you (which probably won’t be for a very very very long time:( you should give a concert!