Understanding the Inventory Scanner

ZfS uses the following platform-dependent scanners to collect inventoried server hardware and software information:

• INVNATVE.NLM, INVALID.NLM and MPKSCAN.NLM to scan NetWare 5.1 and 6.0 inventoried servers.

  The NetWare scanner collects hardware details such as: hard disk drive, BIOS, processor, bus, display adapters, network adapter cards, sound cards, memory cards, serial ports, and parallel ports.

  The software scanning includes the following tasks:

  • Reading PRODUCTS.DAT file and scanning for the Windows applications (.EXE) that are installed locally on the inventoried servers.
  • Reporting the information about the scanned software like the vendor name, product name and the version number.

• INVNATVE.NLM uses SNMP and NetWare API services to report inventory. INVNATVE.NLM uses NWAPI.MAP, SMILE.MAP and SUPPL.MAP configuration files for scanning various hardware inventory classes along with the source of information.

  For example, NWAPI.MAP identifies the classes that are scanned using the NetWare API services, SMILE.MAP identifies the classes that are scanned using SNMP services and SUPPL.MAP identifies the classes that are scanned using System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) services. The list of the configuration files used by INVNATVE.NLM are identified in the HWINVSRC.INI file.

• INVALID.NLM reads the System Management BIOS structures and scans for certain hardware inventory such as BIOS, processors, serial and parallel ports, cache, sound adapters and display adapters.
• MPKSCAN.NLM scans for the software inventory on the NetWare inventoried servers.

  NOTE:  The NetWare scanner that ships with ZfS 3 does not report inventory of processors for multi-processor (MPK) servers if it is not available in the SMBIOS. To scan inventory on a multiprocessor (MPK) NetWare server, you must refer to the TID 2961928 in the Knowledgebase at Novell Technical Services and install the latest patch.

  The NetWare scanner also does not report the virtual memory size.

• INVNATVE.DLL and INVSCAN.EXE to scan Windows NT/2000 inventoried servers.

  The Windows scanner collects hardware details such as: floppy disk drive, hard disk drive, BIOS, bus, mouse, keyboard, display adapters, network adapter cards, modems, sound cards, memory cards, serial ports, and parallel ports. The software scanning includes checking for applications on the inventoried servers and reporting the information about the scanned software, such as the vendor name, and the product name and version.

  NOTE:  On Windows NT/2000 servers, the ZfS 3 Inventory scanner will not scan for Tape drives, Jaz* drivers, and Zip* drives. The Inventory scanner will not accurately report the physical memory if the memory is greater than 2 GB.

  INVSCAN.EXE leverages DMI and WMI support on the inventoried server to report hardware inventory.

The scan information collected by the scanners is stored as scan data files (.STR) locally on the inventoried server. The scanned data is transferred to the Inventory server using the XML-RPC protocol. The Scan Collector receives and stores the .STR files in the scan directory (SCANDIR).

The following sections contain detailed information about the Inventory scanners:

• How the Scanners Collect server Inventory Data
• Scanning Process Flowchart
• Software Information Collected by the Scanners
• DMI-Compliant Scanners
• WMI-Compliant Scanners
• SNMP-Compliant Scanners
• Hardware Data Collected by the Scanners

How the Scanners Collect server Inventory Data

The scanning process is as follows:

• Subscribers must be installed and configured on the inventoried servers for Tiered Electronic Distributions (TED).
• The Server Inventory policy lets you configure the scanning schedule based on which the policy engine schedules and enforces scanning at the inventoried server.
• The Policy Enforcer triggers the Scanner, which reads the following inventory settings defined in the Inventory Service object and the Server Inventory policy.

  • Enable Scan of Machines: By default, the Enable Scan of Machines option is selected in the Inventory Service object property page. The Scanner collects the inventory information of the inventoried servers.

  • Scan Directory Path: Browse to select the DN of the Inventory Service object of the destination Inventory server.

  • Enable Software Scan: If the Enable Software Scan option is enabled in the Server Inventory policy, the Scanner collects information about software applications.

  • Custom Scan Editor: If the Enable Software Scan option is enabled, the Scanner reports the software information. You configure the applications that you want the Scanner to collect information by using the Custom Scan Editor.

  • Configuration Editor: If the Enable Software Scan option is enabled, you can configure the software rules to be referred while reporting the software inventory. For Windows inventoried servers, you can additionally configure for the asset information and the zip names that are to be referred during hardware inventory.

  • Enable DMI Scan: If the server is instrumented for DMI, the scanners query the DMI Service Layer. For more information, see DMI-Compliant Scanners

  • Enable WMI Scan: If the servers are WMI-compliant, the scanners also collect the hardware data by querying the WMI information. The scanners also probe the servers for hardware data. For more information, seeDMI-Compliant Scanners

    We recommend that you instrument DMI/WMI on your inventoried servers and install DMI/WMI components that are supplied by the vendors.

• The scan data of each inventoried server is stored as .STR files in the SCANDIR directory on the Inventory server. The .STR file follows the filename convention: macaddress_gmt_sequencenumber.STR, where macaddress is the MAC Address of the inventoried server, gmt is the time at which the inventoried server is scanned for the first time, and sequencenumber is the internal sequencing number of the inventoried server, which is always zero ('0') to indicate a full scan. For example, 00508b12b2c4_944029836000_0.STR is the .STR file for the server with the MAC address of 00508b12b2c4, the GMT of 944029836000, and the internal sequencing number of 0.
• The Scanner reports errors in local log files only (INVAGENT.LOG and INVNATVE.LOG). The log file is stored in the SYS:\ETC directory on NetWare inventoried servers and in the WINDOWS directory or the TEMP directory on Windows NT/2000 inventoried servers.

Scanning Process Flowchart

The following flowchart illustrates the hardware and software scanning process:

Software Information Collected by the Scanners

The scanners follow this process for software scanning:

• They collect the information about the software on the inventoried servers.
• They customize the software scanning using the Custom Scan Editor.

  By default, the software scanning includes collecting version information of files with .EXE file extensions.

  If Windows software applications (files with .EXE extensions) are installed on the NetWare inventoried server, the scanner interprets the Microsoft Portable Executable (PE) format of these files to collect and report software information.

  If the software applications are installed using Microsoft* Installer on the Windows NT/2000 inventoried server, the scanners use the information from Microsoft Installer (MSI). Otherwise, the scanners collect the software information from the header of the software application files.

• They report the information about the scanned software, such as name of the software product for each product version and the software vendor.

After the scan data is stored in the database, you can view or query the software information.

If you want to know the mode used by the Scanner to scan the inventoried server, see the inventory summary of the inventoried server > Hardware/Software Inventory > Software > Inventory Scanner Information > Scan Mode.

If you want to know the technology available on the inventoried server such as DMI, WMI, and others, see the inventory summary of the inventoried server > Hardware/Software Inventory > General > System Information > Management Technology.

DMI-Compliant Scanners

The scanners for scanning inventoried servers (Windows NT/2000) also include scanning based on the industry-standard Desktop Management Interface (DMI) specification 2.0. These programs use the Management Interface (MI) of DMI to look for the hardware components installed on the inventoried server. The scanners will scan for specific components that are instrumented on the inventoried server through DMI. The scanners will query the DMI service layer to retrieve this information.

The MI allows the DMI-compliant scanners to probe the Service Provider within the Service Layer. The Service Provider collects information from the manageable components and stores the collected information in the Management Information Format database. The Component Interface (CI) communicates with the manageable components and the Service layer.

The following figure shows the scanner interaction with DMI.

For more information on DMI standards, see the DMTF Web site.

To scan the DMI data of the inventoried servers, you need to instrument the inventoried server by installing the vendor-specific components.

For example, if you have a Compaq* Family model server running under Windows NT, download the Management Product software - Compaq Insight Management Desktop Agents software for Windows NT from the Compaq web site.

For Dell* servers, access the DM/Desktop Management Utilities software from the Dell web site.

WMI-Compliant Scanners

The scanners collect hardware data from Windows NT versions 4.0/2000 inventoried servers based on Microsoft's Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) specification.

WMI is the Microsoft implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) that enables accessing management information in an enterprise environment. WMI 1.5 is fully compliant with Common Information Model (CIM) schema, which is an industry standard. For more information, see the Microsoft WMI Web site. WMI also works with existing management standards, such as DMI and SNMP.

The scanners use WMI to look for the hardware components installed on the inventoried server. The scanners also scan for specific components that are instrumented on the inventoried server through WMI.

WMI-compliant scanners are supported on Windows NT versions 4.0 /2000 inventoried servers only.

You can view the WMI data of the inventoried servers in the Server Inventory Summary.

To obtain WMI information from the Windows NT version 4.0 inventoried server:

1. Download Microsoft's Windows Management Instrumentation - Core Software Installation from the Microsoft WMI Web site.

   Only the WMI Core Software Installation download is required to instrument an inventoried server for WMI. To troubleshoot any WMI related problems, you can avail WMI SDK download.

   IMPORTANT:  On Windows 2000 servers, WMI Core Software is already installed.

2. Install WMI Core Software on Windows NT version 4.0 servers.

SNMP-Compliant Scanners

The Windows scanners use the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to report network adapter information and network information such as IP address, subnet mask, etc.

The NetWare scanners collect certain hardware (device) and network information based on SNMP. Additionally, the NetWare scanner also uses SNMP to report software installed and registered in PRODUCTS.DAT. The NetWare scanner uses SNMP v2.0 and the services of HOSTMIB.NLM, IPXRTR.NLM, and IPXRTRNM.NLM. For more information on the details about dependent MIBs and etc., see Hardware Data Collected by the Scanners

Hardware Data Collected by the Scanners

The Inventory Agent collects the following hardware information on the NetWare inventoried servers:

The Inventory Agent collect the following hardware information on the Windows NT/2000 inventoried servers: