[Fusioninventory-devel] about some limits of software inventory

[Fabrice Flore-Thebault]

Hi folks,

Some thoughts to to think about :

I have this issue on OpenBSD : the software inventory gives the list of 
software added by pkg_add, but not the software installed "as a standard 
installation". For example : pf, dhcpd.

The result is that the software inventory is incomplete.

It raises some limits to the usage of the software inventory as a global asset 
management tool :

If i want to list all dhcp servers in GLPI, a reasonable approch should be to 
search for "dhcpd" in the Software section. Fine for Linux hosts : they will 
appear in the results, as every package is managed by the same packaging 
system. Not fine for OpenBSD : as dhcpd, and pf and other software are 
considered as the base system on OpenBSD (and apparently on FreeBSD too), they 
are not listed. 

With an incomplete software inventory, the image of the infrastructure 
provided by the agent remains incomplete. And for my example, this is bad news 
to know that i can't see some of the core services ... No way to monitor that 
the installed versions are accurate to the needs.

My opinion is that the most software installed on a host should be 
inventoried, and therefore we should find a way to list dhcpd and pf and all 
software that is installed as a base application on OpenBSD.

I don't know if there is a tool to do it.

In a second time, I think that we should think about doing an inventory of 
some applications that are not to be treated as "software", bus as specific  
sorts of applications : like web applications (apache vhosts, tomcat apps), 
databases. This applications could be then linked to the accurate plugins in 
GLPI.

The idea behind it is that, with such features, the agent could be a tool to 
give a more deep image of an infrastucture during an audit.

Cheers,

-- 
Fabrice Flore-Thébault