SMS: Inventory Your Desktop Systems, Part 3

Extending SMS with Digital Equipment's POLYCENTER AssetWORKS

This article is the third in a series that discusses Systems ManagementServer (SMS) procedures for inventorying desktops. The first article explainedhow to collect the inventory information, and the second described how todevelop reports with data in the SMS database (for these two articles, see WindowsNT Magazine, May and June 1996). These articles identified necessaryfunctionality and information that native SMS doesn't provide. You can make upfor some SMS shortcomings by creating ingenious queries and programs or byviewing the SMS SQL database with a separate tool such as Microsoft Access.

Another way to supplement SMS is to take advantage of the extensibilitythat Microsoft built into it. Third-party products such as Digital Equipment'sPOLYCENTER AssetWORKS (PAW) and Seagate Technology's WinINSTALL are SMSextensions that eliminate the need for workarounds. PAW adds Enterprise clientsto the list of desktops you can inventory, adds software metering for DOS andWindows 3.X systems, and has built-in management reporting capability. Bycontrast, WinINSTALL automates creation of install packages for softwaredistribution, eliminating the laborious and complex process of writing scriptswith Microsoft Test. WinINSTALL also lets you use SMS to uninstall software fromthe desktop. Both of these excellent products show SMS's extensibility andcreate unique solutions to systems management problems. In keeping with thetheme of this series, this article focuses only on Digital Equipment'sAssetWORKS.

Installation
You must have a working and fully configured SMS Version 1.1 site beforeinstalling AssetWORKS. You install it on the SMS site server by running thesetup program and providing the SQL database information and the SMS serviceaccount data.

The AssetWORKS manual says you need 80MB of free disk space on the siteserver (40MB on a secondary site server) and recommends at least 32MB of RAM. Nosane network administrator will run SMS with only 32MB of RAM, so thatrequirement won't be a problem. However, my experience is that you need toincrease your site server's memory by 16MB over your base memory to maintainperformance when you add software metering to your site (so if you're running at48MB, increase your memory to 64MB).

After installation, AssetWORKS adds several icons to your SMS program groupand creates three new directories, PAW, PAWCLNT, and PAWRPTS, on the siteserver. You will also see four new services in the Control Panel Services applet(PAW Communications, PAW Executive, PAW Reports, and PAW Service Controller) andmany new options in the SMS Administrator tool.

You don't load AssetWORKS; rather, you load the SMS Administratoras usual. First, you notice that AssetWORKS replaces the SMS login banner with alurid, dark red AssetWORKS bitmap. The SMS Administrator window and its windowsfor sites, jobs, packages, queries, and events are familiar but have a few newfunctions. For example, if you select Open from the File menu, you see a list ofnew windows you can open besides the standard SMS windows. These new windowsinclude Management Reports, Report Templates, and Metering. Similarly, if youopen the regular packages or queries windows, you find some predefined objects.If you don't need the packages, queries, or new windows that AssetWORKSinstalls, you can continue with SMS as before.

If you administer SMS on the site server by working with the SMSAdministrator tool on other systems, you need to run the AssetWORKS setupprogram on these systems to see the AssetWORKS functionality. If you don'tinstall AssetWORKS on these systems, you can still open the SMS Administratorand work with the Windows systems as before. You will even see the UNIX hoststhat you have inventoried. However, if you try to view the Personal ComputerProperties (although you can see some groups), you get a Dynamic Link Library(DLL) error and you can't open any new AssetWORKS windows.

Extending SMS to Include UNIX Hosts
To make a PC desktop report its inventory to the SMS site server, you mustrun an inventory process on the desktop. Microsoft supplies a version of theInventory Agent for each OS that SMS supports: INVDOS.EXE for MS-DOS, Windows3.X, or Windows 95 clients; INVWIN32.EXE for NT clients; INVOS2.EXE for OS/2;and INVMAC for Macintosh System 7. Digital Equipment supplies its own InventoryAgent for Enterprise clients.

AssetWORKS comes with an installation script, INSTALL.PAW, that installs,configures, and starts the AssetWORKS Enterprise Client on the UNIX system.Unfortunately, you can't use an SMS script to install this client on the UNIXhost. The host's users don't log in to an NT domain and run a logon script,which is the usual process for installing SMS clients. Instead, you need toaccess the console of the UNIX host and follow five pages of instructions in theAssetWORKS manual to install the client. The manual provides variations of thecommands you need, depending on your UNIX flavor. AssetWORKS's current releasesupports Digital UNIX (formerly OSF/1), ULTRIX RISC, HP-UX, SunOS, Sun Solaris,SPARC, OpenVMS, and IBM AIX clients.

Next, you need to ensure that the UNIX host is talking to the SMS siteserver over TCP/IP. Send a ping from the site server to the UNIX hostand another back to the site server. Once you establish connectivity and installthe AssetWORKS client, you can run the inventory agent on the UNIX box. You canrun the inventory agent on a schedule or invoke it manually with the command //sbin/pawinv

The UNIX host displays a status screen similar to the one for a Windowssystem reporting its inventory, and returns you to the # prompt. The inventoryagent then generates Management Information Files (called .MIFs). The PAWCommunications service on the NT system pulls these .MIFs from the UNIX host tothe SMS site server. The PAW Executive service then preprocesses the .MIFs andplaces them in the SITE.SRVISVMIF.BOX. Now, the standard Inventory Processorservice converts these files, and any other .RAWs and .MIFs it finds, toDelta-MIF files. The Inventory Data Loader service updates the information inthe SQL database.

If you open the Sites window in the SMS Administrator, you see theinventory for the UNIX host, as Screen 1 shows. This example consists of aDigital AlphaStation 200 running Digital UNIX 3.2, a Digital Alpha AXP150running NT Server and SMS, a Compaq desktop running Win95, and a generic 486/66running NT Server and SQL Server.

Although AssetWORKS didn't affect the inventory process for the Windowsboxes, you see a new entry (e.g., Alpha200.paradigms.com) for the Digital UNIXhost. Whereas SMS identifies Windows hosts by their NetBIOS name, it identifiesUNIX hosts by their host name. To change how often a UNIX host reports itsinventory, you need to modify the INVENTORY.INI file in the /PAW/CONTROLdirectory of the UNIX host.

If you select the UNIX host from the Sites window, you get a customarchitecture UNIX Properties window that is a modified version of the PersonalComputer Properties architecture. Screen 2 shows the UNIX Properties window foralpha200.paradigms.com. In Screen 2, the host table for the UNIX host is theequivalent of the SYSTEM32DRIVERSETCHOSTS file in NT. The UNIX Propertiesarchitecture has about 25 groups, many of which do not appear unless you createthe appropriate jobs. For example, the packages icon will not appear unless youinventory some packages.

From this point on, SMS treats UNIX systems the same as Windows systems.The AssetWORKS manual provides specific instructions and examples of how tocreate packages to inventory and distribute software for systemwideinstallation. Make sure that the software you are distributing is appropriatefor the platform and that your setup program is a UNIX script.

Software Metering
AssetWORKS extends SMS functionality for Windows clients by adding softwaremetering and a reporting function. Metering is a special type of inventory--itidentifies the number of copies concurrently in use, rather than the number ofcopies you have installed. Some license packages, for example, allow 100concurrent users, regardless of the number of installations.

AssetWORKS meters software by installing and running a process on the SMSclient. The current AssetWORKS release has clients for DOS, Windows 3.X, Windowsfor Workgroups, NT, and Macintosh, but not Win95, UNIX, OS/2, or OpenVMS. Youcan install the client metering software using SMS and predefined packages thatyou install with AssetWORKS. Screen 3 lists these predefined packages.

You can create a job as usual and specify the target and platformappropriately, and SMS will install and run the terminate-and-stay-resident(TSR) service on the desktop. Then you need to configure metering in the SMSAdministrator Metering window.

Screen 4 shows metering for four software packages. You create new meteringpackages as you usually create packages--by selecting New from the File menu.You can specify the files you're monitoring, the platforms they're runningunder, and the interval you want to sample. For example, you can check once anhour to see how many people are running MS Excel. Screen 5 shows the PackageUsage dialog where you specify the interval.

The TSR service running on the desktop checks the system according to aschedule you specify and answers yes or no to the site server.You can have several instances of MS Excel running on the desktop, or you canhave just one; the system reports only that the metered package is on thedesktop.

The site server then tells you how many desktops are running the softwareat the interval you previously specified. This information displays in thePersonal Computer Properties architecture with a new icon, PAW Metering. To viewthis new icon, you need to open the Reporting window you see in Screen 6.

When you first create and schedule metering, it displays on the right sideof the AssetWORKS reporting window with a Scheduled icon. Once the metering datastarts to accumulate, a new icon appears, showing what reports are available. Toview a report, you have two options: PAW View (a nice graphical representation)or Access View (a predefined reporting view in Microsoft Access).

Two, not well-documented caveats apply to viewing these reports. First, thePAW View button doesn't appear unless you're running the Administrator tool onan Intel box (the PAW Viewer is a 32-bit runtime viewer that calls on somethird-party libraries that weren't available for the Alpha at this release).Second, the runtime Microsoft Access report viewer is a 16-bit program that runsin 286 emulation mode on a Digital Equipment Alpha. Creating this demo on a 32MBsystem took about 10 minutes from the time I selected Access View to the timethe view windows were fully displayed. The conclusion here is simple--run theSMS Administrator tool on an Intel box, where both PAW View and Access View workwell.

Although my two-system demonstration doesn't do PAW justice, PAW Viewdisplays the metering results well, as you see in Screen 7. You can selectvarious graph types, axes, intervals, and legends to represent system usage.Access View lets you create special reports with standard Access tools.

Management Reports
POLYCENTER AssetWORKS includes a set of graphical management reports, asScreen 8 shows. These draw directly from the SQL database. You can run thesereports as is, or you can create new ones from a set of templates. As theprevious article in this series showed, creating a report with a third-party,Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)-compliant reporting tool is no big deal.However, you need to run SMSVIEW.EXE and understand the structure of theunderlying SQL views and database. AssetWORKS adds some of this reportingfunctionality to SMS directly, which reduces the urgency of creating reports.Some users will welcome this feature. I find learning another reporting toolmore troublesome than creating reports in a tool I already know.

Finally, Digital Equipment doesn't offer a modified version of SMSVIEW.EXEthat exposes decent views of the extended database. Consequently, you need theAssetWORKS reporting facility to create reports that work with the extendedinformation. Keep your fingers crossed in the hope that AssetWORKS will furtherthe open systems concept and offer predefined SQL views, a published API, and aSoftware Developer's Kit (SDK) in a future release.

[Editor's Note: After this article was written, Digital Equipmentchanged the name from POLYCENTER AssetWORKS to AltaVista Manager forBackOffice.]