Welcome to part 3 of the series on Installing OCS Inventory NG. In this part of the series we will cover installing the UNIX Agent on CentOS 6 (RHEL 6.0 based).

Note: OCS Inventory NG Agent for Linux can only be installed locally and cannot be deployed using package manager.

Now let’s get started and download the agent from here.

For Linux / Unix these are the required modules.

PERL 5.8

• Perl module XML::Simple
• Perl module Compress::Zlib
• Perl module Net::IP
• Perl module LWP::UserAgent
• Perl module Digest::MD5
• Perl Module Net::SSLeay
• Perl Module Mac::SysProfile is need on MacOSX

dmidecode
lspci on Linux and *BSD (pciutils package)
Make utility
C/C++ compiler like GNU GCC

Optional modules:

• Perl module Proc::Daemon
• Perl module Proc::PID::File if Proc::Daemon is installed
• Perl module Net::SNMP
• Perl module Nmap::Parser
• Perl module Module::Install
• Perl module Net::CUPS
• Perl module perl-cpan

Nmap (v3.90 or superior)

Now that we know what we need for the installation, let’s get started in getting them installed. As noted in OCS Inventory Ng Part 1 we need to have the EPEL repository installed. If you do not have it installed you can do so by following the following instructions.
Go to http://http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL and download and install the EPEL release based on your distribution release. In this example we are running 6.0 release, so EL6 is the chosen package. After installing you are ready to proceed.

Open a terminal session and run the following command to install the prerequisites.

$  sudo yum install perl-XML-Simple perl-Compress-Zlib perl-Net-IP perl-libwww-perl perl-Digest-HAMC perl-Digest-SHA1 perl-Net-SSLeay
perl-Crypt-SSLeay perl-Net-SNMP perl-Proc-Daemon perl-Proc-PID-File pciutils smartmontools monitor-edid

We will also need build utilities as well

$ sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools" # This will ensure that you have all the required tools for the build.
$ sudo yum install ncurses-devel # This is required to enable a make *config command to execute correctly.
$ sudo yum install qt-devel # This is only necessary if you wish to use make xconfig instead of make gconfig or make menuconfig.

Any dependencies needed will be downloaded and installed. Now we are ready to install the agent.

Change to the directory where you downloaded the agent an un-tar it and change into the directory.

$ tar –xvf Ocsinventory-Unix-Agent-2.0.1.tar.gz
$ cd Ocsinventory-Unix-Agent-2.0.1

No lets build and install it using perl

$ perl Makefile.pl

$ make

$ sudo make install

A check for PERL interpreter binary, C/C++ compiler and make utility is made during installation. If one of these components is not found, setup will stop.

Setup will check for:

• dmidecode binary.
• Compress::Zlib PERL module
• XML::Simple PERL module
• Net::IP PERL module
• LWP::UserAgent PERL module
• Digest::MD5 PERL module
• Net::SSLeay PERL module

If not found, it will ask you if you wish to install it. Enter “y” or validate to enable install of required component. If you enter “n”, setup will stop here.

Configuration begin. Choice to configure agent now or later.

Select the path of configuration file directory

Validation to create the directory, and definition of OCS Inventory NG server address (IP address or hoshtname.domain)

You will then have to choose between 3 methods for generating inventory:

1. http: computer is connected to the network and is able to reach the Communication server with HTTP protocol. USED BY DEFAULT
2. https: computer is connected to the network and is able to reach the Communication server with HTTPS protocol. You have to configure SSL on your OCS Server and copy the SSL certificate on the agent directory to use this method
3. local: computer is not connected to the network and inventory will be generated in a file to manually send to OCS Inventory NG operator. This option must be set manually in ocsinventory-agent.conf like this :

 local=/tmp

For two others methods :

 Syntax : http[s]://ocsinventory-ng-server[:port]/ocsinventory

Exemples :

ocsserver.domains.local

https://w.x.y.z

ocsserver.domains.local:1234

https://ocsserver.domains.local

Choice to use or not apache auth, and possibility to define an administrative tag

Choice to create or not a cron task, definition and validation of agent files directory

Choice to remove or not the old agent version

Choice to use or not software deployment feature, SNMP scans feature and send an inventory

If Accountinfo file doesn’t exist, it will be created, and the inventory will be sent to the server

Now we have a Windows and a Linux agent installed and they have both reported inventory to the management server. Next part we start exploring the interface and some of the features of OCS Inventory NG.