nixCraft Linux Sys Admin Blog

Open Source Software and Hardware Inventory Management Software

Posted: 11 Mar 2008 01:21 PM CDT

I’m looking for good open source software and hardware inventory management software. A quick search on sourceforge returned following inventory management system / software management apps:

=> OCS Inventory NG, Open Computers and Software Inventory Next Generation is an application designed to help administrator keep track of the computers configuration and installed softwares. Low network traffic HTTP communications between agents and server. I’m currently testing this software and I will update all of you about my results.

Other old (outdated) softwares

=> PcInventory Web-based system to track the Pc and the installed peripherals.

=> phpMyInventory is a web-based hardware, software, and peripheral inventory system using PHP & MySQL. Currently stable on PHP version 4xx only!

=> Windows Inventory. A Computer Hardware and Software Inventory system. Based around wmi, vbscript, mysql & php. Expandable via modules to include software distribution, remote control, event viewer, disk monitoring, etc.

Most of these software are outdated. Basically, I need to keep inventory for following items

Open source inventory asset management software
Should able to track inventory
Auditing feature
Inventory of equipment owned and leased (including lease expiry)
Software inventory for both Windows and UNIX systems
Import / Export function etc

Do you have any recommendations for me? Please add them in the comments.

Load Balancer Open Source Software

Posted: 11 Mar 2008 11:01 AM CDT

I’ve worked with a various load balancing systems (LBS). They are complex pieces of hardware and software. In this post I will highlight some of the open source load balancing software. But what is load balancing?
It is nothing but a technique used to share (spared) load / services between two or more servers. For example, busy e-commerce or bank website uses load balancer to increase reliability, throughput, uptime, response time and better resource utilization. You can use following softwares as an advanced load balancing solution for web, cache, dns, mail, ftp, auth servers, VoIP services etc.

Linux Virtual Server (LVS)

LVS is ultimate open source Linux load sharing and balancing software. You can easily build a high-performance and highly available server for Linux using this software. From the project page:

Virtual server is a highly scalable and highly available server built on a cluster of real servers. The architecture of server cluster is fully transparent to end users, and the users interact with the cluster system as if it were only a single high-performance virtual server.

=> Project Web Site

Red Hat Cluster Suite

It is a high availability cluster software implementation from Linux leader Red Hat. It provide two type services:

Application / Service Failover - Create n-node server clusters for failover of key applications and services
IP Load Balancing - Load balance incoming IP network requests across a farm of servers

=> Product web page

The High Availability Linux Project

Linux-HA provides sophisticated high-availability (failover) capabilities on a wide range of platforms, supporting several tens of thousands of mission critical sites.

=> Project web site

Ultra Monkey

Ultra Monkey is a project to create load balanced and highly available network services. For example a cluster of web servers that appear as a single web server to end-users. The service may be for end-users across the world connected via the internet, or for enterprise users connected via an intranet.

Ultra Monkey makes use of the Linux operating system to provide a flexible solution that can be tailored to a wide range of needs. From small clusters of only two nodes to large systems serving thousands of connections per second.

=> Project web site

Personally, I’ve worked with both LVS and Red Hat Cluster Suite and I highly recommend these softwares.