Open source help desk/ticketing/bug tracking/asset management software.
Since the topic of help desk and asset management software has come up on this list recently, I thought I'd forward along a long list of OSS web applications that handle these tasks: http://www.opensourcehelpdesklist.com/ Lots of stuff on it I wasn't aware of. Scott ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: asset management tools?
On Wednesday 01 March 2006 05:02 pm, Bill McGonigle wrote: If you find a clear winner please report back - I see this wheel reinvented repeatedly. Unfortunately, I haven't found any clear winners by far. It doesn't seem that any of the tools out there are specifically for managing an inventory. Perhaps I'll be another to reinvent the wheel again down the road. Most of the implementations I've found are hindered by database structures where they just won't allow an arbitrary set of attributes for items in the inventory. I'd love to have found one that would work with just a small adjustment, but it's just not feasible without a ground-up implementation I guess. Enetman was the closest I found to what I wanted, but only because it allowed a bunch of the attributes that I was looking for, though not all. I could almost have made it work, but it kept making Firefox crash, so I just won't bother. -Neil ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: asset management tools?
I know eventually we plan to have user-defined asset reporting in our software, but it's not there yet. I'll remember to send out an update when we eventually get it done :) -chris Neil Schelly wrote: On Wednesday 01 March 2006 05:02 pm, Bill McGonigle wrote: If you find a clear winner please report back - I see this wheel reinvented repeatedly. Unfortunately, I haven't found any clear winners by far. It doesn't seem that any of the tools out there are specifically for managing an inventory. Perhaps I'll be another to reinvent the wheel again down the road. Most of the implementations I've found are hindered by database structures where they just won't allow an arbitrary set of attributes for items in the inventory. I'd love to have found one that would work with just a small adjustment, but it's just not feasible without a ground-up implementation I guess. Enetman was the closest I found to what I wanted, but only because it allowed a bunch of the attributes that I was looking for, though not all. I could almost have made it work, but it kept making Firefox crash, so I just won't bother. -Neil ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: Asset Management
There are tons of FOSS projects that do asset management and they have many of the features you seek. Note the common vein in the urls. =) Not to be rude, but I can search too. The results of a search aren't always all that useful though (see below). http://sourceforge.net/projects/asset-tracker Has potential - I'll play with it. http://simpleassets.sourceforge.net/ Very inflexible, limited selection of attributes and really more intended as a responsibility system it appears, keeping track of who owns different assets. http://helpcore.sourceforge.net/ Website is a link to a site that doesn't work. http://ascent.sourceforge.net/ Abandonware that didn't get too far. https://sourceforge.net/projects/enetman/ Bad website - will have to download a play to see what features it has. http://sourceforge.net/projects/nexb Doesn't actually do asset management, but is a module of an asset management project they have planned. http://assetmanagement.sourceforge.net/ Development Status : 1 - Planning http://sourceforge.net/projects/irm/ Decent project, except it doesn't have any ability to change the attributes you can store. This is actually a pretty decent looking package for request tracking, task management, etc. I'm just apparently in a minority looking for an asset manager that *only* does asset management, and doesn't compromise that for a bunch of other functionality that I'd prefer to stick with Nagios and Request Tracker. Any integration between them, I'd rather just do with cross-links and I'd be perfectly satisfied with that. -N ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: asset management tools?
On Wednesday 01 March 2006 05:02 pm, Bill McGonigle wrote: IRM (domain specific): http://sourceforge.net/projects/irm I looked at that too, but it wasn't very flexible in the storage of attributes. It's really more as Paul described in his other reply and I really only want an inventory program. These inventory/ticketing/todo/monitoring packages are neat and I'd be happy to only use the inventory aspects of them if they didn't feel so limited and compromised for the rest of the functionality. CRM-CTT (more general): http://crm-ctt.sourceforge.net/ This seems to be about the same as IRM. More of a ticket management system with an emphasis on assets... I think. Browsing around their demo, it kept changing languages on me. If you find a clear winner please report back - I see this wheel reinvented repeatedly. If I do, I will. I'm starting to wonder if I'll just go and reinvent the wheel again though... I know that anything I code along those lines won't be very flexible though as I tend to program things like this very self-centered. Rather than abstract everything from everything so that it can work for everyone, I tend to be the type to consolidate all the functionality I need to a very specific bash script or something. ;-) -N ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: asset management tools?
On Wednesday 01 March 2006 08:53 am, Paul Lussier wrote: It started out as a means to track hard drive temperature over time. But since we needed to have all systems and all drives in all systems in the database, we decided to make it a general asset management system. From there we decided to add tables to manage users. From the database, once we get the scripts written, we're planning on generating: - /etc/netgroup - /etc/sudoers - /etc/ssh/ssh_host_keys - DNS zone files - LDIF for an LDAP server - ~special user/.ssh/authorized_keys(2) - a (dynamic) web based phone/pager contact list Have you ever looked into cfengine for these kinds of tasks? I've heard that it's very flexible for this sort of detailed remote management, but that it can be a bit of a pain to get setup. For that matter, has anyone here used cfengine before? I've been considering trying to play with it on my own and seeing how it can make our production environment a little happier. I'd love to see the list of things you care about. Feel free to mail me privately if you don't want to discuss this on list. Well, due to some rather bad development practices here, it's important to know the date that a particular installation of our software was built on, because development doesn't really have branches or tags in CVS or milestone releases or anything. Instead, whatever is committed into CVS when the installation tarball is built is what gets installed. I know it makes no sense and I'd love to change it (as would the developers for that matter), but management seems to think it's not worth the investment of time to learn how to do things right. Other than that, specific hardware peripherals, firmware revisions, ram types and sizes, slots for more, hard disks, brand/model/submodel, OS and version, role within our production infrastructure, peers in terms of clustering, wishlist if it's approaching a limit of its hardware, date of purchase, number of Us... That's what I come up with off the top of my head and most of that can be kept track of so long as I can customize the attributes it stores. -Neil ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: asset management tools?
On Wednesday 01 March 2006 08:45 am, Bair,Paul A. wrote: On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 20:54 -0500, Neil Joseph Schelly wrote: I'm looking to replace a spreadsheet listing all our servers with a web-based asset management tool. I'm wondering what experience all of you may have with the available tools out there. Essentially, I want to be able to list servers and specify arbitrary attributes for those servers as we have a number of inventory attributes we keep track of that are rather specific to our use and I'm sure won't be in any preselected group of attributes. This might not be what you're looking for, but this is how I keep track of alive systems. I run WebJob I'm looking for more of a simple solution - I really just want something that does asset management well and can let me keep track of changes with dated notes, and stuff. It can be very manual - it just needs to be flexible. -N ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: asset management tools?
On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 20:54 -0500, Neil Joseph Schelly wrote: I'm looking to replace a spreadsheet listing all our servers with a web-based asset management tool. I'm wondering what experience all of you may have with the available tools out there. Essentially, I want to be able to list servers and specify arbitrary attributes for those servers as we have a number of inventory attributes we keep track of that are rather specific to our use and I'm sure won't be in any preselected group of attributes. This might not be what you're looking for, but this is how I keep track of alive systems. I run WebJob (http://webjob.sourceforge.net/WebJob/index.shtml) on the systems I manage and have implemented the Harvest System Info recipe (http://webjob.sourceforge.net/Files/Recipes/webjob-harvest-system_info.txt) which produces a browsable repository of host-based information that can be viewed online or packaged up and disseminated as an archive. The recipe is also extensible so that you can collect virtually anything from a system (such as the amount of physical memory on the system), then integrate it into the HTML reporting system. Here's some sanitized sample output of the OS report (truncated for readability): SystemInfo OS Report client_id os os_release os_version machine processor memory client1 FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE MYKERNEL #0 i386i386 3963 client2 FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE GENERIC #0 i386i386 2039 client3 FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE GENERIC #0 i386i386 2043 In addition to the OS report, you can call up reports based on the OS release, OS version, machine architecture, CPU, and type of platform. Another nice thing about the recipe is that I collect the information periodically, so it's always up-to-date (within reason). Not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for. Andy It would be nice to be able to attach files to server records, add an inventory of spare parts (or effectively non-server items), track changes to servers, and a make use of a user authentication system. Those aren't requirements, but would be pretty cool to have. -Neil ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: asset management tools?
Neil Joseph Schelly [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I'm looking to replace a spreadsheet listing all our servers with a web-based asset management tool. I'm wondering what experience all of you may have with the available tools out there. I've never found anything decent. We're in the (very slow) process of writing our own. Part of the problem with an asset management system is that it's a shame to stop there :) What we're doing is builing what I called the Grand Unified Database of Everything (I need a better name so I can have a snazy acronym :) It started out as a means to track hard drive temperature over time. But since we needed to have all systems and all drives in all systems in the database, we decided to make it a general asset management system. From there we decided to add tables to manage users. From the database, once we get the scripts written, we're planning on generating: - /etc/netgroup - /etc/sudoers - /etc/ssh/ssh_host_keys - DNS zone files - LDIF for an LDAP server - ~special user/.ssh/authorized_keys(2) - a (dynamic) web based phone/pager contact list Eventually, our hope is to allow HR and IT to create and (en|dis)able accounts and priviledges via a web based interface to the database as well, which will require creating and managing Kerberos principals, VPN access, Active Directory entries, etc. Did I mention this is very slow going? :) Essentially, I want to be able to list servers and specify arbitrary attributes for those servers as we have a number of inventory attributes we keep track of that are rather specific to our use and I'm sure won't be in any preselected group of attributes. I'd love to see the list of things you care about. Feel free to mail me privately if you don't want to discuss this on list. It would be nice to be able to attach files to server records, add an inventory of spare parts (or effectively non-server items), track changes to servers, and a make use of a user authentication system. Those aren't requirements, but would be pretty cool to have. We've allotted for free form notes to be attached to each system, eventually we expect this to be used mostly via a web driven interface, but we're building up a bunch of commandline tools which may automagically insert data into these fields as well. I'd love to say I can give you what I have, but a) it's so immature I don't think I could get it all running again in new location, b) there's nothing generic about our setup with the exception of the database schema itself, which can easily be re-created ad hoc. Btw, for those who are interested or care and may want to carry on further discussion of design choices (read: start a flame war ;) we're doing this all in Postgres and Perl because: a) Postgres has a lot of features we need that MySQL is lacking. Oracle was never considered for the obvious reasons. (as an aside, we know both MySQL and Postgres, and use MySQL for other stuff in-house.) b) Perl has an extremely robust database framework already built for it which is lacking in other languages. Additionally, we have hundreds of thousands of lines of Perl code here, so writing a few more things in perl is a no-brainer for us. PHP was never considered, since we're doing so much with command line apps. PHP will probably not be used for any web stuff either, since we're mostly a perl shop filled with people who already eat, sleep, and breathe perl. Python may well be a great fit for this type of application, but a) see above point about eating perl here, and b) I don't think Python has the database infrastructure perl has quite yet (though I'd love to learn otherwise). Other languages mentioned were: Ruby, and Lisp. Both rejected because a) no one here know Ruby well enought, though we all think it's a really neat language, and Lisp, well, mostly for the same reasons as already mentioned for all the other languages :) -- Seeya, Paul ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: asset management tools?
On Feb 28, 2006, at 20:54, Neil Joseph Schelly wrote: Essentially, I want to be able to list servers and specify arbitrary attributes for those servers as we have a number of inventory attributes we keep track of that are rather specific to our use and I'm sure won't be in any preselected group of attributes. Two I've heard good things about but haven't yet deployed myself are: IRM (domain specific): http://sourceforge.net/projects/irm CRM-CTT (more general): http://crm-ctt.sourceforge.net/ If you find a clear winner please report back - I see this wheel reinvented repeatedly. -Bill - Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 603.252.2606 http://www.bfccomputing.com/Page: 603.442.1833 Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Asset Management
Hello Neil, There are tons of FOSS projects that do asset management and they have many of the features you seek. Note the commonvein in the urls. =)Check out --http://sourceforge.net/projects/asset-trackerhttp://simpleassets.sourceforge.net/http://helpcore.sourceforge.net/http://ascent.sourceforge.net/https://sourceforge.net/projects/enetman/http://sourceforge.net/projects/nexbhttp://assetmanagement.sourceforge.net/http://sourceforge.net/projects/irm/Thanks and good luck,Joseph\\From: Neil Joseph Schelly [EMAIL PROTECTED]Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]To: "Greater NH Linux! User Group" gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.orgSubject: asset management tools?Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 20:54:21 -0500I'm looking to replace a spreadsheet listing all our servers with a web-based asset management tool. I'm wondering what experience all of you may have with the available tools out there.Essentially, I want to be able to list servers and specify arbitrary attributes for those servers as we have a number of inventory attributes we keep track of that are rather specific to our use and I'm sure won't be in any preselected group of attributes.It would be nice to be able to attach files to server records, add an inventory of spare parts (or effectively non-server items), track changes to servers, and a make use of a user authenti! cation system. Those aren't requirements, but would be pretty cool to have.-Neil--__--__--
Re: asset management tools?
Paul Lussier wrote: I've never found anything decent. We're in the (very slow) process of writing our own. Part of the problem with an asset management system is that it's a shame to stop there :) Five years ago, give or take, when I was still a system administrator at the University of Kentucky, we came to the same conclusion and built something not quite like what Paul described, but close enough. We made different technical choices but had something that was useful enough. I have no idea if that system is still in place. It was started before I got there, but I made a few enhancements and bug fixes. We included a crude trouble ticket system in it, so we could track events by machine. This sort of thing is never finished because you can always find something to add and ways to improve the software, etc. What we're doing is builing what I called the Grand Unified Database of Everything (I need a better name so I can have a snazy acronym :) I like your choice of name. It could be made into an acronym in two ways, either G.U.D.E or GUDoE. I like 'em both. The first makes me think of gouda, and I'd be inclined to call it cheese instead. Like good cheese, the product could improve or worsen with age. It would depend a lot on how it is handled and the environment in which it is stored. The second acronym makes me think of Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. Like Godot, the product may never arrive, at least not in a final state. Anyone waiting for it to be finished would be like the two characters in the play who wait for a Godot who never comes. Well, I'm being bellowed at and must run. Cheers, Jason ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: asset management tools?
Bill McGonigle [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Two I've heard good things about but haven't yet deployed myself are: IRM (domain specific): http://sourceforge.net/projects/irm I looked at IRM a while back. It seemed to be similar to RT, but from a different angle. Where RT approaches trouble-tracking from a people perspective, IRM approaches things from a system perspective. Every ticket is attached to a specific machine in the database. Ideally, what is mneeded is a merging of these two systems. We need a general trouble ticket system where random reqeuests can be initiated, assigned, and resolved, but can also be attached to systems when appropriate. RT has no means of searching for all tickets related to hostA. Yet, (from what I recall) IRM has no means of dealing with a request for fixing my phone. IRM looked like quite a good piece of software, though. It just didn't meet for my needs at the time I looked at it, about a year or so ago, and we're pretty tied to RT after 5 years :( -- Seeya, Paul ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
asset management tools?
I'm looking to replace a spreadsheet listing all our servers with a web-based asset management tool. I'm wondering what experience all of you may have with the available tools out there. Essentially, I want to be able to list servers and specify arbitrary attributes for those servers as we have a number of inventory attributes we keep track of that are rather specific to our use and I'm sure won't be in any preselected group of attributes. It would be nice to be able to attach files to server records, add an inventory of spare parts (or effectively non-server items), track changes to servers, and a make use of a user authentication system. Those aren't requirements, but would be pretty cool to have. -Neil ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
