I’m a network administrator by day. (Batman by night.) Network Administration, like pretty much everything else, follows the 80-20 rule. 80% of the my daily tasks take 20% of my time. 20% of my tasks take up the rest.
Some things just take a long time. Checking logs is and always will be a moderately time consuming task. Sure, there are monitoring programs to keep an eye on each computer (and I use many of them, Nagios most of all), but I prefer to do it manually, just to keep myself honest.
Printers are only branch of tasks that inevitably take longer than they should. Setting them up, fixing them, buying ink, adding new paper, giving users access. Printers suck. It’s a fact of life.
Until recently I assumed that managing inventory would fall on the same list. It’s something that has to be done, but it always takes forever…always.
And, I lie. I’ve started using Spiceworks at the office. It’s a help desk ticket system / inventory list / network management / unified IT portal destination that takes all of thirty minutes to set up and works like a charm. I don’t need to pass along the sales pitch, but here at my office, we’re using Spiceworks for two things: help desk ticketing and inventory.
Spiceworks runs a web browser with a web form that users can fill out. A ticket is then generated and the relevant department workers are notified. From here we can respond to the ticket at our leisure and the user can keep an eye on the item’s status through the web interface. No more lost ‘my mouse is broke’ emails or long forgotten repair requests. Best of all, I can run reports to see who is having the most issues, what tasks are reoccuring, and where the department needs to improve.
Inventory is performed using SSH for Mac/Linux computers and WMI for Windows machines. Our network had some difficulty in getting all the windows machines to get recognized, primarily because we do not use windows domains. Being unable to push policy to turn on WMI services, I was forced to travel to machines individually to get them working. Mostly though it worked and the small tweaks involved didn’t take half as long as doing manual inventory. With everything setup I can get computer names, ip addresses, model numbers, hard drive space, mac addresses, software versions, and dozens of other facts within seconds. Inventory isn’t quite fire and forget, but it’s no longer drudge and drudgery.
