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.

I have been debating setting my personal blog back up for some time. It just so happens the week I decide to go ahead and do it a shiny new version of wordpress comes out. This version of wordpress sports a new interface for the backend. The most two noticeable changes are the dashboard and menus.

The dashboard is now able to be organized with drag and drop style windows. It also now come with a “QuickPress” Windows to start churning out posts immediately. Another window shows  general information about how many posts. comments etc.  In the Upper right hand corner there is a small gray tab labeled “Screen Options” that allows you to select windows that you want hidden.

The menus have undergone a complete transformation.  The tab bar has been replaced with a collapsable sidebar which feels more intuitive.  Gone are “Write” and “Manage” as they have been replaced with simpler items based on what you want to work with suchs as “Posts” or “Pages”. When the toolbar is expanded, actions (Add, Edit, etc) appear as a subitem after you have clicked the main item. When the toolbar is collapsed, subitems appear as a popup menu. The menus as a whole have been organized so that somone new to wordpess can learn to navigate pretty quickly.

The interface as a whole is very polished with a few small pet peeves that I can live with.  The Drag and Drop ability has been enabled on screens through the interface including the post screen.  There is a new plugin browser feature that allows you to search for new plugins and immediately install them provided you have  ftp access to wordpress directory.  SCP/SFTP (Uploading via SSH) is not supported at this time.