The Inner Sanctum

When starting my last job I needed to get an adequate inventory of equipment on the network including IP, machine name, service tag, name of the user as well as  the software installed.  I could have spent my spare time running around to each machine  running something like Belarc Advisor and writing the rest down. Even on a network of around 30 computers and other peripherals this could be and inadequate use of my time.  I started to search around for inventory software that could at least do what Belarc does but run at login and dump to a network share.  I even looked at a few solutions such as newt but they proved to be too costly. I finally managed to happen on to Spiceworks.

Spiceworks is a network admin’s swiss army knife. This windows based app takes inventory of your network equipment as well as PC software and hardware. It also handles network and Exchange monitoring, license and asset tracking as well as vendor tracking.  It even includes a built in helpdesk and trouble ticketing portal and is integrated with their own support community. It runs as a system tray app or can run as a system service on either a workstation or a server , I recommend the latter.  The best part? Its FREE! All of this is accessed through clean a web based interface that is AD Supported.  If your organization prefers it can have the AD’s removed for a fee.

To get is information the software uses a combination of WMI, SNMP and in some cases SSH.  In an Active Directory environment, turning on WMI (and RPC) is a simple matter of modifying group policy settings. All the information is gathered at specified time intervals remotely and doesn’t require any software to be executed on individual machines.

The software also has customizable reports that can provide a lot of essential information like which PCs have anti-virus installed properly and which ones don’t.  In our environment when I wanted to see which Dell servers and workstations  had service contracts ready to expire, I was able to create a report with a list of computer names and Dell service tags captured from a scan and export it to a CSV that was easily imported into their customers site.

I have just briefly touched on the power of this software. I recommend an administrator running a network of any size to at least download and evaluate this software. Download it today: http://www.spiceworks.com/

So apparently I’m a “Slightly Dorky Nerd King”.  I’m wondering if the dork meter is a little too high and the literature meter a little too low……..Eh, maybe not.

Sometimes its good to be king.

Some may wonder about the meaning of my blog title “The Inner Sanctum”.  I actually took the name from an Old Time Radio (OTR) show I used to listen to.  Late one night when I was in middle school I began to flip the A.M. stations.  Most A.M. Stations are required to power down their transmitters at night except for a few station that around before the rule was put into place.  Because of this one could catch radio stations from hundreds of mile away.  This particular night I stumbled on to WGN Radio out of Chicago airing the show “When Radio Was”.

“When Radio Was” is a show produced a company called Radio Spirits Inc.  Each show highlights several episodes from OTR shows.  In a single sitting you could here episode from such shows as “The Saint”, “The Lone Ranger”, “The Green Hornet”, “The Shadow”, “Jack Benny”,”Burns and Allen”, “The Twilight Zone”, “Boston Blackie” and many others from “The Golden Age” of radio.

Radio’s “Golden Age” generally took place between the 1930′s and the early 1950′s.  This was a time before the television, when actors had nothing more then their voice and sound effects and the listener had little more then their imagination.  As television creeped into homes a lot of these shows began to transition to the screen.

“The Lone Ranger” and “The Twilight Zone” are probably two of the more obvious transitions but others, such as “The Green Hornet” which debuted Bruce Lee as Kato and “The Saint” with Roger Moore.

With the recent holidays one might have seen a prime reference to and OTR.  Fans of “A Christmas Story” will probably remember the character Ralphie listening to “Little Orphan Annie” and deciphering with his decoder ring, “Drink More Ovaltine”.

These shows are fun to listen to and with Internet media, such as podcasting, you can now listen to a lot of these shows online. Most of the shows are now out of copyright and in the public domain and are widely available online. From time to time I may post a specific article about a specific show recommendation to listen to.