Date: 05/17/07 (IT Professionals)    Keywords: technology, database, linux

My company is looking for an audit tool which will help us track down hardware, e.g. when someone says "do we have a spare dual core PC kicking around?" we could search a database (updated daily?) of specs including when those machines were last used.

It's easy enough (in theory) to keep track of PC specs and where they were deployed but the hard part is finding out if they're actually being used - not that any of us hoard hardware :)

We have ~200 Windows machines (mostly XP or 2003 Server, but some NT4 and a few Vista installs recently) plus a few Linux (Red Hat and SUSE) servers in one site; we do maintain a couple of subnets, but the tool wouldn't have to span them (we could run it separately on each net if need be).

The tool doesn't have to be freeware but personally I'm a big fan of open source; it would, of course, have to be malware-free and be able to interrogate Windows machines (the Linux boxes would be a bonus but not essential). We're not going the extra step of trying to physically locate the hardware - that would require too much technology (i.e. money), and it won't hurt the techies to do a little legwork. :)

Any recommendations?

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/itprofessionals/56836.html