Lite inventory agent

Small inventory agent compatible with OCS Inventory NG and GLPI. Builds and runs on linux and freebsd (and probably other unixes, too)

History

A couple of years ago, where I work, we started using OCS Inventory NG, which is a really useful application in enterprises. It allows system administrators to inventory servers and workstations, in order to plan obsolescenses and investments. We also started using Thinstation to recycle old computers as remote desktop terminals, by booting them via PXE. Unfortunately, the OCS Inventory Agent for Unix is written in Perl. The Perl interpreter was quite big for the time (~16MB) and couldn't be put into the Thinstation images without getting a performance hit on booting. Moreover, the agent doesn't work on a system with a read only filesystem (actually, the filesystem is read-write, but changes are lost when the terminal is powered off, since it's a in-RAM filesystem). So I decided to write a small agent in C++ to be able to inventory also those machines which I was not able to do with the official agent. The agent is not complete yet, but it can already produce an inventory of the machine and send it to the OCSInventory server, or save it locally. The compiled program weights around 500kb on disk, and only has zlib and openssl as dependency, which are already present on any Thinstation installation. It also uses tinyxml2, a very small and efficient XML parsing/writing library, linked statically into the executable.

This is not the official OCSInventory NG agent, which can be found here: https://github.com/OCSInventory-NG/UnixAgent

Usage

-h, --help                         Print usage
-c, --conf <config_file>           Specify configuration file
-s, --server <server>              Specify OCSInventory/GLPI server url
                                   If the server needs authentication, use the standard syntax <user>:<password>@<host>
    --format <format>              Specify the inventory format: FORMAT_OCS or FORMAT_GLPI
-l, --local <folder>               Save a local inventory in the specified file or folder
    --stdout                       Print inventory to stdout

-t, --tag <TAG>                    Specify tag. Will be ignored by server if a value already exists
    --nosoftware                   Do not retrieve installed software

    --agent-string <string>        Specify custom HTTP agent string

-d, --daemonize                    Detach from running terminal
-w, --wait <s>                     Wait for the specified amount of seconds before building the inventory

--logger <backend>                 Specify error log backend (STDERR / SYSLOG).
                                   Default is standard error if attached to a terminal, otherwise syslog. 
-v, --verbose                      Verbose mode
    --version                      Print version and exit

    --use-current-time-in-device-ID  Use current time in the device ID, instead of the BIOS Date.
                                     No need to use this option unless you know why you need it.

The -l and -s option are mutually exclusive.
If no server or output file is specified, either via the -s/-l option or via configuration file (option -c), the program will exit without doing anything.

Examples:
  Print inventory to standard output :
    ocsinventory-agent --stdout

  Send inventory to server http://ocsinventory-ng/ocsinventory :
    ocsinventory-agent --server http://ocsinventory-ng/ocsinventory

  Use the configuration file /etc/ocsinventory-ng.conf :
    ocsinventory-agent --conf /etc/ocsinventory-ng.conf

  Send inventory to server https://ocsinventory-ng/ocsinventory which requires http basic authentication :
    ocsinventory-agent --server https://user:password@ocsinventory-ng/ocsinventory

  Save a local inventory to /var/tmp/inventoryFile.xml :
    ocsinventory-agent --local /var/tmp/inventoryFile.xml

  Save a local inventory to /var/tmp/<device_id>.xml :
    ocsinventory-agent --local /var/tmp/