Extending SMS with Digital Equipment's POLYCENTER AssetWORKS
This article is the third in a series that discusses Systems Management
Server (SMS) procedures for inventorying desktops. The first article explained
how to collect the inventory information, and the second described how to
develop reports with data in the SMS database (for these two articles, see Windows
NT Magazine, May and June 1996). These articles identified necessary
functionality and information that native SMS doesn't provide. You can make up
for some SMS shortcomings by creating ingenious queries and programs or by
viewing the SMS SQL database with a separate tool such as Microsoft Access.
Another way to supplement SMS is to take advantage of the extensibility
that Microsoft built into it. Third-party products such as Digital Equipment's
POLYCENTER AssetWORKS (PAW) and Seagate Technology's WinINSTALL are SMS
extensions that eliminate the need for workarounds. PAW adds Enterprise clients
to the list of desktops you can inventory, adds software metering for DOS and
Windows 3.X systems, and has built-in management reporting capability. By
contrast, WinINSTALL automates creation of install packages for software
distribution, eliminating the laborious and complex process of writing scripts
with Microsoft Test. WinINSTALL also lets you use SMS to uninstall software from
the desktop. Both of these excellent products show SMS's extensibility and
create unique solutions to systems management problems. In keeping with the
theme of this series, this article focuses only on Digital Equipment's
AssetWORKS.
Installation
You must have a working and fully configured SMS Version 1.1 site before
installing AssetWORKS. You install it on the SMS site server by running the
setup program and providing the SQL database information and the SMS service
account data.
The AssetWORKS manual says you need 80MB of free disk space on the site
server (40MB on a secondary site server) and recommends at least 32MB of RAM. No
sane network administrator will run SMS with only 32MB of RAM, so that
requirement won't be a problem. However, my experience is that you need to
increase your site server's memory by 16MB over your base memory to maintain
performance when you add software metering to your site (so if you're running at
48MB, increase your memory to 64MB).
After installation, AssetWORKS adds several icons to your SMS program group
and creates three new directories, PAW, PAWCLNT, and PAWRPTS, on the site
server. You will also see four new services in the Control Panel Services applet
(PAW Communications, PAW Executive, PAW Reports, and PAW Service Controller) and
many new options in the SMS Administrator tool.
You don't load AssetWORKS; rather, you load the SMS Administrator
as usual. First, you notice that AssetWORKS replaces the SMS login banner with a
lurid, dark red AssetWORKS bitmap. The SMS Administrator window and its windows
for sites, jobs, packages, queries, and events are familiar but have a few new
functions. For example, if you select Open from the File menu, you see a list of
new windows you can open besides the standard SMS windows. These new windows
include Management Reports, Report Templates, and Metering. Similarly, if you
open the regular packages or queries windows, you find some predefined objects.
If you don't need the packages, queries, or new windows that AssetWORKS
installs, you can continue with SMS as before.
If you administer SMS on the site server by working with the SMS
Administrator tool on other systems, you need to run the AssetWORKS setup
program on these systems to see the AssetWORKS functionality. If you don't
install AssetWORKS on these systems, you can still open the SMS Administrator
and work with the Windows systems as before. You will even see the UNIX hosts
that you have inventoried. However, if you try to view the Personal Computer
Properties (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 must
run an inventory process on the desktop. Microsoft supplies a version of the
Inventory Agent for each OS that SMS supports: INVDOS.EXE for MS-DOS, Windows
3.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 Inventory
Agent 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 UNIX
host. 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 to
access the console of the UNIX host and follow five pages of instructions in the
AssetWORKS manual to install the client. The manual provides variations of the
commands you need, depending on your UNIX flavor. AssetWORKS's current release
supports 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 site
server over TCP/IP. Send a ping from the site server to the UNIX host
and another back to the site server. Once you establish connectivity and install
the AssetWORKS client, you can run the inventory agent on the UNIX box. You can
run the inventory agent on a schedule or invoke it manually with the command /<installation
directory>/sbin/pawinv
The UNIX host displays a status screen similar to the one for a Windows
system reporting its inventory, and returns you to the # prompt. The inventory
agent then generates Management Information Files (called .MIFs). The PAW
Communications service on the NT system pulls these .MIFs from the UNIX host to
the SMS site server. The PAW Executive service then preprocesses the .MIFs and
places them in the SITE.SRV\ISVMIF.BOX. Now, the standard Inventory Processor
service converts these files, and any other .RAWs and .MIFs it finds, to
Delta-MIF files. The Inventory Data Loader service updates the information in
the SQL database.
If you open the Sites window in the SMS Administrator, you see the
inventory for the UNIX host, as Screen 1 shows. This example consists of a
Digital AlphaStation 200 running Digital UNIX 3.2, a Digital Alpha AXP150
running NT Server and SMS, a Compaq desktop running Win95, and a generic 486/66
running NT Server and SQL Server.
Although AssetWORKS didn't affect the inventory process for the Windows
boxes, you see a new entry (e.g., Alpha200.paradigms.com) for the Digital UNIX
host. Whereas SMS identifies Windows hosts by their NetBIOS name, it identifies
UNIX hosts by their host name. To change how often a UNIX host reports its
inventory, you need to modify the INVENTORY.INI file in the /PAW/CONTROL
directory of the UNIX host.
If you select the UNIX host from the Sites window, you get a custom
architecture UNIX Properties window that is a modified version of the Personal
Computer Properties architecture. Screen 2 shows the UNIX Properties window for
alpha200.paradigms.com. In Screen 2, the host table for the UNIX host is the
equivalent of the \SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS file in NT. The UNIX Properties
architecture has about 25 groups, many of which do not appear unless you create
the appropriate jobs. For example, the packages icon will not appear unless you
inventory 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 to
create packages to inventory and distribute software for systemwide
installation. Make sure that the software you are distributing is appropriate
for the platform and that your setup program is a UNIX script.
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