|
FastTrack Inventory deployment
Most often FastTrack Inventory is uploaded from a logon script. If the purpose of the inventory
is to collection information about client computers, simply adding this one script line to
the logon script will do the trick:
This page will cover other scenarios, where the logon script is not based on FastTrack Scripting Host
or a scenario, where a supplement to logon script is needed, for example for a server farm, where
anyone rarely logs on.
For these scenarios we will require either an exe or msi file, which can be created with these simple steps:
- Create a new script.
- Write "UploadInventory" in the script window.
- Hit the "Create Exe File" or "Create Msi File" button in the editor and save an exe or msi file to for example your netlogon share.
If an msi file is preferred, the scheduled task option should be used. We will refer to these as "Inventory.exe" or "Inventory.msi".
Please refer to the FastTrack Inventory page
for more information in general about FastTrack Inventory.
|
Scenario 1: Including the exe file in an existing logon script
If you are not using
FastTrack Logon, one natural way to get inventory, would be to include the 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 2-3 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"
Set oShell = Nothing
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")
Set oShell = Nothing
Note that if you later upgrade to the full version of FastTrack Scripting Host, the equivalent
of doing this is to simply include the command UploadInventory in your
FastTrack Logon script.
Scenario 2: Deploying the exe through group policies
Another option is to execute the exe file through group policies. There are multiple ways
to do this, the most obvious ways being through a logon, logoff, startup or shutdown script.
Keep in mind that if you use a startup or shutdown script, you will not get user information.
If we wanted to execute the inventory exe at logoff to get the most recent information for turned off
computers, 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:
Scenario 3: Deploying the msi through group policies
A third option is to deploy the msi through group policies. The msi installs a scheduled task that runs daily, meaning
that we get the advantage of the upload being executing daily as long as computers are turned on, even if no user logs on and off.
The disadvantage is that the task runs in a system account, meaning that a user name is not uploaded along the other inventory information.
To deploy the MSI file through regular group policy management, simply just add it as a computer software installation:
When logging on to a Windows XP computer that is under the used 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.
