A: Windows, Linux, MacOS X. The list of operating systems that Inventory has been successfully run on is maintained here. If you find that Inventory runs on additional operating systems that are not listed please let us know so that we may update our list.
A: Prerequisites can be found in the user's guide here.
A: Inventory is constantly adding new device support in each release. The complete list of out-of-the-box device support can be found at http://inventory.alterpoint.com/supporteddevices. Our content exchange site, http://forge.alterpoint.com, also contains additional device support.
A: For the 2008.10 release of NAI you simply need to download the Adapter or Tool crate zip file from http://forge.alterpoint.com and unzip it in your NAI installation directory. Then restart your NAI service and the new Adapter or Tool will be ready to use.
A: Inventory does not currently have server/workstation management capabilities, its focus is on managing your network infrastructure.
A: A modern Dual-core AMD or Pentium with 1Gig of memory should be able to handle 2000 devices or so using the default Derby database. If you switch to MySQL or PostgreSQL on the same hardware, you can probably manage up to 5000.
If you want to manage 5000+, I would recommend two Dual-core processors and 2Gig of memory – using MySQL or PostgreSQL – along with a few configuration changes we can tell you about if you need it.
A: NAI can produce recordings of device operations (*.record files). To view these simply go to http://dev.inventory.alterpoint.com/recordingTool.
A: This is an issue with PNG rendering on Windows 2000 that requires a GDI+ dll update from Microsoft. You can obtain the dll as a free download here from Microsoft. The download is in the form of a self extracting executable, and you'll want to make sure that the 3 files within it extract to a location in your system path. Once that is done, Inventory will run as expected.
A : Don't run Inventory as root. And don't run Inventory when su to root. Even though the ztserver.sh script will switch user's over to the 'ziptie' user before starting the Inventory server, there are (_mysterious_) issues with native libraries when doing so. Start Inventory as a regular user, but using sudo rather than su. If you're already started and failed when running as root, you may need to rm -rf the repository directory before trying to run using sudo.
A: The error message is base64 encoded. Use a base64 decode like this one to decode it. (The example, “U29tZSBlcnJvciBtZXNzYWdl,” decodes to “Some error message”)
A: GCJ will not work, Inventory requires Sun's Java. Refer to NetworkAuthority Inventory Server Prerequisites for the prerequisites for Inventory. As for how to install Sun's Java for your particular OS, that is outside the scope of this FAQ. Google can be a great place to start for OS-specific help.
A: Go to https://your-server-name:8080 to load the web UI
A: Backup the following directories: derby, lucene, repository
NOTE: If you've customized configuration files in osgi-config, you should back those up, as well. But remember that if you install a newer version of ZipTie, those files may contain entries that did not exist before, and therefore simply overwriting them can be dangerous. You will need to manually merge your configuration changes back into the new installation.
A: In the server directory there is a admin.pl script that will give you an administrative shell to create users and roles. Type 'perl admin.pl' to start and use the '?' for help.
Any user can change their own password in the Inventory web UI by clicking on their username in the top right of the application.
A: The various ports (HTTP, FTP, TFTP) are configured by files. See this table to find the file that controls the port you are interested in changing:
| Service | Files | Property(s) |
|---|---|---|
| TFTP | osgi-config/network/tftp.properties | port |
| FTP | osgi-config/network/ftpd.properties | config.socket-factory.port |
| HTTPS | osgi-config/config.ini,osgi-config/jetty/jetty.xml, and osgi-config/repository/repository.properties | replace '8080' with desired port |
Note: On Linux the ztserver start script performs iptable port-forwarding from, for example, port 69 to port 11069. Under Linux, Inventory always binds on high-ports because it is running as an unprivilaged account (for security reasons) and therefore requires these port-forwards. If you simply want to change the ports that devices interact with Inventory on under Linux, you only need to change these port-forward entries and not the ports that Inventory binds those services on.
On Windows you will need to change the bind ports in the above files.
A: When installing the Inventory server using the .deb package, the ziptie-server service will be added to your /etc/init.d directory. This service is a symbolic link to a bash script called ztserver in your Inventory server directory that is in charge of controlling the server (for detailed information on what the ztserver script does, refer to this forum post.
One of the features of the ztserver script is to enable port redirection on server startup and disable it on server shutdown. The port redirection uses the iptables command to redirect the standard ports for FTP, TFTP to the higher ports that the FTP and TFTP servers Inventory uses binds to (11021 by default for FTP and 11069 for TFTP).
When redirecting the ports, the ztserver script assumes that the hostname reported by the hostname -s command resolves to an valid IP address that is not simply an alias for localhost. On Ubuntu systems, there is an issue with the /etc/hosts file that incorrectly maps the localhost to 127.0.1.1 and also maps the hostname of the system to the localhost. The fix for this is to do a simple edit of your /etc/hosts to something like this:
127.0.0.1 localhost insert_your_ip_address insert_your_hostname
This will associate the 127.0.0.1 IP address as local host and the specified IP address with your specified hostname. Once this is done, it is recommend you stop your Inventory server and perform a sudo iptables -t nat -F command to flush out any previously stored entries in the NAT table. A start of the server should properly set up the port redirection.
For sanity sake, to check the status of the NAT table, you can execute the sudo iptables -t nat -L command.