Client Inventory Option.
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with the ability to run powershell from Linux clients, couldn’t we have an inventory program to grab hardware info of each machine registered to fog?
I have the issue where i have about 100 machines that cannot connect to the network with out a USB adapter.
I was hoping I could get all the same information entered into the inventory of the machine with just the client.
Great Product I have been using it for years now. Very happy to see it still active.
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I agree. I asked for the something similar here: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/12096/allow-client-to-pull-inventory-information-without-pxe-booting
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@astrugatch While I definitely see why you’d like to have this feature in the fog-client I can’t see us adding this any time soon for different reasons:
- There aren’t many requests for that feature
- It would take a fair amount of time to implement because it needs to be done sort of from scratch in the fog-client and as well cross-platform (Win, Linux Mac). I guess that I’d take weeks to do this as I can spend only a couple of hours of my free time to work on this project.
If you really want/need this feature I may ask you to join in and help us. Does not need to be programming the client. First you might want to open an issue on github as things won’t get lost as fast as they do here in the forums. Second you better post which clients you have (Windows? Version?) so we might focus on those first when implementing the feature. And third, please get your hands dirty and help us find out how to grab the inventory data on the client (we can do registry querys, call programs and system libraries). Collect all that information in the new issue on github and we might be able to add this feature over the next few weeks.
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Thanks for the input. I will definitely be looking into how to help with this as it would be extremely useful to me and move FOG from being just imaging to a semi mini-management platform for a small organization like mine.
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@Sebastian-Roth said in Client Inventory Option.:
@astrugatch While I definitely see why you’d like to have this feature in the fog-client I can’t see us adding this any time soon for different reasons:
- There aren’t many requests for that feature
I find this surprising, hasn’t this been a thorn in the side of mixed OS network admins for a long time? Even assuming a fairly homogenous mid-size corporate network of mostly Windows workstations with a few Macs and perhaps some Linux production/server/pbx stuff…To be able to gather in an OS-agnostic way a granular inventory using a PXE and thereon basing your image deployment decisions… This is something I have wished for since attempting a related thing in SMS Server 2003 way back in the day. - It would take a fair amount of time to implement because it needs to be done sort of from scratch in the fog-client and as well cross-platform (Win, Linux Mac). I guess that I’d take weeks to do this as I can spend only a couple of hours of my free time to work on this project.
If you really want/need this feature I may ask you to join in and help us. Does not need to be programming the client. First you might want to open an issue on github as things won’t get lost as fast as they do here in the forums. Second you better post which clients you have (Windows? Version?) so we might focus on those first when implementing the feature. And third, please get your hands dirty and help us find out how to grab the inventory data on the client (we can do registry querys, call programs and system libraries). Collect all that information in the new issue on github and we might be able to add this feature over the next few weeks.
I would definitely be willing to help with this, at both a code and doc level. Isn’t this a common request of mixed domain network admins? I’m surprised this feature isn’t requested often as you mentioned in your comment. Isn’t this one of the primary desires of admins that deal with a mid-size corporate networks, where they have primarily Windows workstations with perhaps the odd Linux or Mac box thrown in? To be able to base imaging deployment decisions on up-to-date hardware details? A PXE pre-loaded troubleshooting/inventory environment seems like the perfect, OS agnostic answer to this. SMS 2003 allowed us to pull WMI details but again, this is platform specific. Isn’t this the whole point of PXE?
- There aren’t many requests for that feature
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@LJay said in Client Inventory Option.:
A PXE pre-loaded troubleshooting/inventory environment seems like the perfect, OS agnostic answer to this.
I am not sure I get this right? Are you saying we should have inventory collection on PXE booting?