Doug Hughes wrote: > We used to do a LOT of this stuff at Auburn University, but more > indirectly. We had to audit the machines for how much memory they had > once per year and confirm the previous year's results (it was a > spreadsheet). It was a little bit of remote collection using tools such > as sysinfo to gather the data and compare it against the relevent columns.
At UT Austin, we have asset tracking tags on servers, monitors, etc..., but I think they recently changed their policies so that they only tag machines that cost $5k or more. We used to put all sorts of information (like amount of RAM, purchase price, purchase order #, rack location, etc...) into our asset tracking database, but that information has gotten woefully out of date. So, where we see that kind of additional information, we normally delete it, and we don't put it in for new machines. I don't think we've ever tracked disk drives or disk space, nor do we track chassis vs. motherboard serial numbers. And, of course, we also don't track upgrades, or the old memory or drives that get pulled out. We recently bought a bunch of new machines, and upgraded all of them to 32GB or 64GB using 4GB DIMMs, which meant that about 500GB of RAM got put in, and man 2GB RAM DIMMs got pulled out, for a total of just over 768GB of RAM -- that's 3/4 of a TB of RAM. I've got the old 2GB RAM DIMMs sitting in a shelf in my office, and I'm supposed to package them all up and ship them back to the VAR, because part of the extra-good price deal we got was that they would ship the machines with what was already pre-installed, but that we'd ship that stuff back. I haven't done it yet, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon. I hadn't replied sooner, because I don't think we've got anything useful to say with regards to SOX compliance. And since the VP of IT, head of the central IT Services Department, and CIO for the University just got fired last week and he was the biggest proponent of things like ITIL, I don't think we're likely to be moving forward in that area any time soon. But I did want to speak up and provide a different data point for Universities. Not that ours is necessarily a good model to follow, but it is different. -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
