On Tue, 22 Mar 2005, Chandrakant Reddy wrote:
> I wanted to develop an application using which an administrator can
> know what are the software installed on the machines on his LAN and
> also the configuration details of the desktop machines (like cpu,
> number of processors and their serial numbers). I don't know how to
> start, what are api's available Wants your guidance
You want SNMP: Simple Network Management Protocol.
On one hand, this will require a bit of infrastructure build out --
every client machine will need to be configured, etc. On the other hand,
SNMP support is built into lots and lots of things, including every
modern operating system (all versions of Windows, Linux, Mac OS / OSX,
etc), most network devices, many printers, etc. So while you will have
to configure it everywhere, you won't have to install it anywhere, or
have to worry about it not working at all.
The book _Perl for System Administration_ gives a brief overview of the
main things you'd need to know about SNMP, as well as sections on how to
interact with it in Perl using the Net::SNMP module. You can also read
about Net::SNMP at CPAN.org:
<http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlsysadm/>
<http://search.cpan.org/~dtown/Net-SNMP-5.0.1/lib/Net/SNMP.pm>.
You could come up with some other approach that doesn't use SNMP, but it
will ultimately need to be able to run code on every platform you have
to deal with. If everything is homogenous, this isn't necessarily so
bad, but if you have even mild diversity -- say, some Win2000 machines,
some XP machines, a couple of Macs, some Linux servers, etc -- then
getting a hand-made solution to work everywhere is a nightmare and you
might as well have just used SNMP to begin with.
--
Chris Devers
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