How to Inventory Mac OS Machines from a Share

  • This topic applies to Mac OS machines only.
  • For Linux/Unix/Mac OS machines, you can discover and inventory those machines without an agent from within CAM Administrator.

Running inventory from a share is a three-step process that includes preparing, running, and processing.

To run inventory from a share:

Part 1: Prepare the Network Share Location

Note that you only need to do this first part once. To prepare the network share location:

  1. Create a network share with read access and, if you plan to use the same location to write the generated output files, write access by other machines.
    If you also run inventory from a Windows share, make sure this location is different.
  2. From CAM Administrator's Machine menu, select Remote Inventory > Prepare Agent.  This will generate an inventory configuration file in the location shown in the Prepare Remote Inventory Agent dialog box.
    This dialog box lists locations for both Windows-based machines and Mac OS systems. Navigate to the appropriate location and copy all the files in that folder to the share.

Part 2: Run Inventory

  1. From the machine you want to inventory, navigate to the share location you prepared in part 1 above, and run the Inventory Mac.app script.

    The agent will write its inventory files into a subfolder of the folder where Inventory Mac.app is located. The agent creates the subfolder in the form esm_<machinename>_yyyymmdd. For example, an inventory run in August 10, 2012 would create the esm_JERRY160L20120810 subfolder.

  2. Once inventory completes, you can process it for inclusion in the CAM database.

Part 3: Process Each Inventory

You can process the inventory .xml files in one of two ways:

  • Select Machine > Remote Inventory > Import. Enter (or browse to) the subfolder containing the inventory files, and select Import.

    - or -

  • Use the ProcessEMInvFS.wsf script from any machine on which the CAM Agent is installed:
    1. Find the ProcessEMInvFS.wsf script in this location on the machine where the CAM Administrator is installed:
      • On 32-bit machines: C:\Program Files\Cherwell Asset Management\CAM Administrator\InventoryFromShare
      • On 64-bit machines: C:\Program Files (x86)\Cherwell Asset Management\CAM Administrator\InventoryFromShare
    2. Copy the ProcessEMInvFS.wsf script to the C:\Windows\System32\Wex4962 folder or C:\Windows\SysWoW64\Wex4962 folder of a Windows machine running the CAM Agent.
    3. Run ProcessEMInvFS.wsf from the machine you copied the file to in the previous step.

ProcessEMInvFS.wsf takes the following arguments:

  • /input:"EmInvFS-output-folder"

    This is the folder into which one or more subfolders containing the inventory files are located. If you did not specify an output folder in part 2 above, this is the share folder itself. In the above example, you would specify:

  • /input:"\\myserver\esminv"

    All subfolders with names conforming to the convention used to inventory from a share will be processed.

  • /visible
    (Optional) Use this to specify that the user interface of the agent used to process the inventory files will be visible. If you do not specify this, the agent runs without displaying its user interface.
    If you are processing more than one inventory, you will need to select the agent's Close button after each inventory is processed.
  • /nosummary

    (Optional) Use if you do not want the ProcessEMInvFS.wsf script to display a summary once all inventories have been processed. If you do not use /summary, a message box is displayed.

  • /delete

    (Optional) Use this to specify that each subfolder of inventory data is to be deleted once it has processed. If you do not specify /delete, each folder is renamed once it has been processed by pre-pending "processed_" to the subfolder name. For example, after the inventory contained in esm_JERRY160L20120810 is processed, that folder will be renamed to processed_esm_JERRY160L20120810. This is done so that if the script is rerun at a later date, the folder will not be re-processed.

  • /debug

    (Optional, undocumented) Use to display script progress messages.