Re: using WMI for computer inventory

James,

I very much appreciate your comments. I looked at your web site ( before
these posts ) but did not download your trial version ( 81MB is way too much
for my dial-up at home....yes, you read that correctly.....where I live
there is no dsl available! ). Will eventually, though. Just from the
office.

Anyway, I am eventually going to undertake this project. I might come back
to you when I get stuck somewhere......if you do not mind!

Right now I am simply looking at HTA but - as mentioned - would like to get
to a 'real' application. But I never have any time for anything so it might
be a good while before I actually start!

--
Cary W. Shultz
Roanoke, VA 24012
Microsoft Active Directory MVP

http://www.activedirectory-win2000.com
http://www.grouppolicy-win2000.com



"James Crosswell" <james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eSBgon$dFHA.3864@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Cary Shultz [A.D. MVP] wrote:
>> Scott,
>>
>> Thank you for the reply. I am going to be one of those people creating
>> both the custom script ( most likely an HTA... ) and then later the
>> application that will do this ( there are several apps that I have
>> downloaded right now that I am examining to see what they do and what
>> they do not do so that I can take the good from all of them and avoid
>> missing anything...if that is possible ).
>>
>> My concern was that in a larger environment that WMI is too clunky (
>> read: bloated ). Someone whose opinion I respect says that he always
>> tries to find another way to do the things that WMI does....especially in
>> larger environments. Since I am pretty new to both WMI and ADSI I wanted
>> to check with the pros.....
>
> WMI is far from clunky - try searching the file system for a file using
> WMI - it's about 5 times faster than the search built into windows.
>
> Some gotchas to look out for though:
> - WMI will have to be installed on pre Win2k/WinME machines.
> - DCOM needs to be configured to run automatically on Win9x machines
> - You'll need to verify DCOM permissions on any machines that give you
> grief during a remote audit
> - DEP settings need to be checked as well
> - Some OSs don't support all of the fields/classes that you'll find in
> WinXP... so you'll have to either ignore those fields or create logic to
> handle this
> - We've found that a significant percentage of the machines out there
> actually have broken WMI repositories which prevent access to certain
> classes... you'll have to either avoid using those classes or reinstall
> the OS on those machines
> - Traffic over the network may also be a concern (especially if the app
> that you write is going to be threaded and performing multiple audits
> simultaneously). If you're just grabbing hardware info then this shouldn't
> be too much of a problem but if you're grabbing software info as well then
> you might want to run the wmi script or audit agent on the machine itself
> and just send back a compressed snapshot of all the info it found to your
> central inventory/server - rather than issuing the WQL receiving WQL
> result sets over the wire.
>
> --
>
> Best Regards,
>
> James Crosswell
> Software Engineer
> Microforge.net Limited
> http://www.microforge.net


.

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