Name

Uliska - UNIX, Linux Inventory and Configuration Scanner

Why

While working as UNIX SA in different companies/environments I was facing the same problem more than once: hosts inventory database (with invention of ITIL, this is more often called CMDB recently). As I have found -- again more than once -- this is a never ending story with no good answer in many cases.

I haven't seen suitable commercial solution yet (heavy weight or overpriced or GUI only or all 3 together), there's still discussions on the net about open source solution.

What that means, is that in many places best tool for managing servers inventory and configuration managements tool is still MS Excel today.

Another example is troubleshooting vendor's application. In many cases vendor request (if there's no access to server hardware) to send hardware and software scan : you've got list of commands from vendor, execute, tar/gzip and send. Why not automate this, by pre-creating list of commands and combining with web-browser for viewing output?

Development principles

Scanner

• Modular, extendable

• Understable - aimed primarily at UNIX SA's

  • Simple format for commands list file

• Requires minimum deployment to clients Basically that means Perl with no extra modules. Perl is installed by default on most current Unices, to avoid any extra installations try to write Perl code with as least requirements as possible.

• Light - ability to run from cron or inetd

  • Must take little CPU, memory and disk resources when run and stores data. Very little intelligence on the client side, most parsing done by server. Simply run sequence of UNIX commands and capture output into YAML file.
  • Print out either to file of STDOUT.

• Support multiple OSes by adding modules/list of commands

Parser

• Modular, extendable parsers - using factories

• Parse into data structure for web services API for submission

Viewer

See http://dmytro.github.com/Ulivie

TBD

Who

Dmytro Kovalov, dmytro.kovalov@gmail.com, started in Jan, 2012.