Filed under: Macworld, Enterprise, Software
Show floor video: JAMF Recon makes asset inventory a snap
For big cross-platform enterprises or educational institutions, keeping track of all those hardware assets can be a pain in the Sarbanes. Fortunately there are plenty of products looking out for your needs, including some particularly Mac-friendly sorts: Keyserver, NetOctopus, LANrev, Apple Remote Desktop, and more. Among the most comprehensive Mac management suites is JAMF's Casper, with modules for deployment, imaging, package building and asset management. The asset management module -- Recon Suite -- was recently spun out as a separate offering and has added Windows PC audit tools. JAMF's Chip Pearson gives us a two-minute drill on Recon's information gathering power; video after the jump. (I have no idea why the wrong title cards are ending up on these videos -- perhaps it has something to do with post-Macworld jet lag!)
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
brian said 1:51PM on 1-23-2008
Wow. Hate to say it, but that was some pretty bad audio. Sometimes I couldn't hear the interviewer, sometimes I could hear the crowd better than the interviewee. I appreciate the effort, but next time, try to arrange a private showing. :-) Bonus demerits to the vendor for ripping off how OS X looked five years ago.
In other news, I wrote something like this for my company about 4 years ago. If you want to do this yourself, learn the following: PHP, MySQL, /usr/sbin/system_profiler, cron, curl, and a bit of shell. The secret is to use curl to GET/POST data to a PHP/MySQL-enabled webserver. The rest practically writes itself. :-)
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Kieran said 2:46PM on 1-23-2008
Any chance of some more detailed instructions or look at what you did to make you management system Brian? I would be very interested in seeing.
brian said 3:30PM on 1-23-2008
Email me: brianashe, gmail, com.
D said 9:54PM on 1-23-2008
@Brian - I think it is cool you have built a similar tool, but do you offer any kind of support? Does it work on 10.2 through 10.5?
I think JAMF Recon is targeted more at enterprise customers. I visited their booth on Thursday and was impressed with the fact it not only worked on Macs but they have a Windows client too. It seems very easy to add computers to inventory so I don't have to run some script on every one of them.
I have about 200 Macs and a few Windows computers that I currently keep track of in a FileMaker database, and it would be nice to track all the applications in addition to hardware information.
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brian said 10:22PM on 1-23-2008
Of course, their app is obviously for big companies that are happy to pay for a nice complete off the shelf system that does lots of good things. (My own company currently uses the similar LANDesk.) My system is just a little thing I wrote for fun but it has proven useful in some ways. But if you like making your own tools, or can't afford a solution like theirs (hint: they don't show the price on their web page) then my system is one way to go. If you're familiar with shell scripting, building web apps, or both, you will find it's pretty simple. (And I'm not trying to sell it--unless you *really* want to pay me :-) -- it's a pretty easy system that you could build yourself to suit your own needs. Apps, hardware, free disk space, uptime, whatever you want to monitor.) Feel free to email me at the above address for more info.