|
FastTrack Inventory deployment
This page will cover various means of getting your inventory data uploaded.
If the primary purpose is to inventory your client computers, simply adding this one script line to
the logon script will do the trick:
This is the quickest way to get inventory uploaded, but it will rarely inventory servers,
as it requires someone logs on to them from time to time. Another good solution is therefore to create an msi file that
can be deployed with Group Polices, which will install a recurring scheduled task that executes at a random time once every day.
All you need to do to generate the msi file is to click the "Compile Inventory MSI" button
in the script editor.
Below various deployment options are described, except for the logon script option.
Please refer to the FastTrack Inventory page
for more information in general about FastTrack Inventory.
|
Option 1: Deploying an msi through group policies
If you use the "Compile Inventory Msi" button to generate an msi file, the msi will install a scheduled task that runs daily to upload the data.
To deploy the MSI file through Group Policy management, simply add it as a computer software installation:
When logging on to a Windows XP computer that is under this group policy, it looks like this for a few seconds.
It takes only a few seconds to install, because the MSI file is only 2 megabytes in size.
Note that when you deploy an MSI, it will intentionally not do an initial upload on install, because this would
cause all computers to upload more or less at the same time. If you need to test that everything works as intended,
you can go to the scheduled task list on one or more computers and manually start the scheduled task to verify the
data upload, as shown below.
Option 2: Including an exe file in an existing logon script
If you are not using
FastTrack Logon, one obvious way to upload inventory data, is to use the "Compile Inventory Exe" menu
and include the generated exe file in your current logon script.
The Inventory.Exe file could be put on the netlogon share and simply be executed from there. Executing the exe file will normally take about 2 seconds only.
If you are using VBScript, the part to execute the exe file could look like this:
Set oShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
oShell.Run "\\AcmeDom\netlogon\Inventory.exe"
If your client security settings pop up a security warning, you can
get by this by disabling the zone check through the environment variable.
Then the script could look like this:
Set oShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
set oEnv = oShell.Environment("PROCESS")
oEnv("SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS") = 1
oShell.Run "\\AcmeDom\netlogon\Inventory.exe"
oEnv.Remove("SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS")
Option 3: Deploying an exe through group policies
Another option is to execute a generated exe file through group policies based on another event than
the log on process, like logoff, startup or shutdown.
If we wanted to execute an inventory exe at logoff to get the most recent information,
we could simply add the inventory.exe as a logoff script. First we need to locate the user
logoff script GPO property:
If the domain was "Fasttrack" and we have put the Inventory.Exe in the root of the netlogon share, we simply
add it as a logoff script:
