The inventory frontend it hosted in GB at http://leo.gb.nrao.edu/inventory/.
By default, the page lists all the machines in its inventory. You can narrow this list by Operating System and/or Site from the links at the top.
If you are hip to SQL syntax, you can enter such syntax in the Filter text box. If SQL is not your thing, scroll to the bottom of the page and enter substring searches for a particular column. If you find the display has too many columns, you can uncheck the colums you don't want shown. You can also save the display as a comma delimited text file for use in most spread sheet programs.
Clicking on the hostname will give you a page of all the information in the database for said hostname. This is the easiest way to see things like disks and software installed on said machine. You can also click on the header of any column to sort by that column.
Finally, at the very top of the page you can select the table of information you wish to view. By default, the machines table is selected. Switching to other tables, like disks or software, allows you to sort and select based on those inventory items. This is, for example, how you would find all the machines with Acrobat Pro installed.
Install the inventory.sh script in a place where all your unix machines will execute it on a regular basis. Here at the AOC, almost all of Solaris and Linux machines run a cron job every four hours and access an NFS drive. For those machines that cannot run the script via NFS, use a cron job like the following. Please set up an rsync server at your own site. This is also how we are doing inventory on OSX.
0 2-22/4 * * * rsync -q rsync.aoc.nrao.edu::inventory_script/inventory.sh /tmp/inventory.sh && /tmp/inventory.sh --rsync
For Windows machines, the AutoPatch process is used. For this, make sure that you have a site-fixes.bat file in the AutoPatch area on your DCA, your clients are in whatever GPO is required to run the AutoPatch process, and that your site-fixes.bat file calls inventory.vbs.
Next, periodicly run the populate_db.sh script to update the database in NM with your data gathered from the inventory.sh script. Here at the AOC, we run the populate_db.sh script on a linux server once a day at 11am. That is a good time because the Windows AutoPatch process runs at 10am every day.