The Sun Inventory application tracks these items by installing a small application on the machine that you want to inventory. Initially it will report back the hardware and operating system. As qualified applications are installed the agent will report these back to the Sun Inventory application without any interaction on your part.

Getting started is simple. Go here to get started. If you don’t have a Sun account go ahead and sign up. Once you are signed in it is a 3 step process to get started.

Step one is to download what are known as service tags. This is the application that you will install to “tag” your inventory so that it can be put into the application. Tags are available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Enterprise Linux, Solaris and Windows. Download the appropriate tag for your operating system and install it on the machine on which you want to inventory. The tagging also works on Virtualized Machines from Red Hat Virtualization and from VMs using Virtual Box. I didn’t check any other virtualization applications.

Steps two and three are discovering and registering your “gear” as Sun calls it. This downloads a small java program onto your machine to help in finding and registering tag ready machines. With this application you can find your machines in various ways such as hostname, subnet and ip address. Below is a screen shot of the information that you can use to find your tagged your machines.

Once you have done this a screen will pop up showing the gear that the registration client found. You will then login to your Sun Account and choose which products that you want to register. Once they are registered what you will see is like the following screen shot.

As you can see I have my 1u server tagged along with the host and virtual operatings systems. The OpenSolaris machine is running on Virtual Box. The OpenOffice application was installed after I tagged and registered the machine. Since the tag runs as a service it picked up the OpenOffice application and registered it as part of the OpenSolaris machine.

This is a great way to get your machines and related software inventoried and get control of it.

-j

The latest version release is 8.72. The author of the software states that even though the version number is high alien should be considered experimental software and should not be used to convert or replace important system packages. That said alien has been in use many years and converted many packages.

The CentOS repositories don’t show an alien package. Apparently this seems to be a debian thing. Never fear though, alien to the rescue before ever installing the package!

First obtain the source package, unpack it and cd into that directory:

wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/alien/alien_8.72.tar.gz
tar xzvf alien_8.72.tar.gz
cd alien


Don’t install it! We get to have that fun here in a couple of steps. Now get the alien*deb package and download it into the source directory which you just unpacked. Once that is done we’ll convert the deb package to rpm and install it.

wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/alien/alien_8.72_all.deb
./alien.pl -r alien_8.72_all.deb
alien-8.72-2.noarch.rpm generated
ls
Alien alien_8.72_all.deb alien.lsm.in alien.spec debian GPL Makefile.PL README
alien-8.72-2.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh alien-8.72-2.noarch.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:alien ########################################### [100%]
which alien
/usr/bin/alien


There you have it! You now have alien and can convert your favorite rpm packages to deb or deb packages to rpm. Enjoy!

-j