[u-u] Asset tracking...

[Alan J Rosenthal]

I like my own system quite a lot.  I think that I got some advice from U-U
people while developing it.

I have text files that look like this:

	label flaps 3 monitor
	loc ba1234
	owner dept
	user flaps
	model Gateway HD 2200
	serial m0t7a-70c-o6374
	date 16 December 2008

(one file per monitor plus one file per computer (system unit), the latter
including both desktop machines and machines in racks)

I'm required to keep some of this data for inventory purposes, and other
data I keep because it's useful to me as sysadmin.  I have shell scripts
and awk programs which turn those into all sorts of reports, including
web pages for various faculty members to be able to look at where all of
their machines are and such.  Most fields are not used for most reports.
One of my custom reports is for my own use in going around checking that
my records are up to date.

I can quickly grep for various things, e.g. "admin flaps" for a list of all
machines I admin (the above is a monitor hence doesn't have an 'admin', but
system units do -- those are the two items I track).

ALSO, all of my machines I admin send e-mail hourly to a special address
which dumps the message in an appropriate file based on the machine name.
The messages look like this:

	Linux flaps-desktop 3.2.0-75-generic #110-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 16 19:11:28 UTC 2014 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
	Description:	Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS
	Release:	12.04
	Codename:	precise
	up 05:23:55

(also says if they need a reboot for a kernel upgrade, and some other things
like that)
It's all about grepping.

And they all also do more things daily which I hesitate to do hourly,
e-mailing to a different but analogous address things which look like this:

	Linux flaps-desktop 3.2.0-74-generic #109-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 9 16:47:54 UTC 2014 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
	eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:50:bf:b5:3b:2b  
	eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:b0:d0:b7:18:c3  
	serial: 53xyc01
	monitor serial number: m0t7a70c06374
	You are not running a system with a Hardware Enablement Stack. Your system is supported until April 2017.
	ii  flaps-common                                  36                   
	ii  flaps-key                                     1                    
	ii  flaps-managed                                 14                   
	ii  flaps-se-printers                             3                    
	ii  flaps-sessions                                2                    

and also listing version of Adobe Flash if installed, and anything else I
care to be able to grep for.
(You can see in the above that this particular machine automatically
installed a new kernel version this morning, hence the daily message at
the moment lists a different version than the more-recent hourly message!
That difference will go away tomorrow morning.)

>Server Fred:
>- is an HP model 1234 with 256 GB RAM, and a 5 TB RAID
>- is in data centre "Smith" cage #4 rack #102 shelf #17.
...

Those items which can't be derived automatically get added to the inventory
files described at the beginning of this message.

regards,