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Good, Bad, Terrible. That’s my experience with Spiceworks so far.

When I first installed it, I thought it was quite good. I ran a scan of the network and it seemed to find the devices ok. Complained about credentials. Fair enough.

I gave it domain admin credentials and ran the scan again. About 10% of windows clients got inventoried. Hang on. What happened to the other 90%?

I went to the support forum and found instructions to open firewall ports that seem to date from the Server2003 era. There is this thing now called Windows Firewall Advanced configuration, have you ever heard of it? Anyway, archaic firewall rules created. Waited a day. Scanned again. Now even less of the devices are being inventoried. Hang on. What happened there?

Back to the support forums. Hours of reading about people complaining this shit doesn’t work properly for them either. Hang on, there is an agent. Oh derp, obviously we need to use the agent. But then, the description of the agent says it is designed to keep track of machines that aren’t in the office. That doesn’t really apply in this situation because I’m talking about desktops here.

So… do I install the agent, or will that just create even more troubleshooting work for me?

Right now, I think spiceworks is pretty terrible and am ready to scrap it totally.
All I really wanted was something to keep track of software being used on each computer. At this point I think it would be easier to script it using powershell.

Why are only a very small portion of my domain joined Win7 Pro machines being inventoried? They all have the same frickin settings, same software, similar Dell hardware, same network, same group policies applied, same firewall rules. This is frakkin hopeless. My mom could write a better software than this. On her typewriter.

Heck, I don’t even want to mention how bad it was at scanning the network switches, routers etc - none of them inventory correctly. It asks for user/pass which I gave it, but it never asked for community strings which is what it should be using.

Good question, why does spiceworks want to SSH login to my Cisco router and switches? Are you serious guys?

3 Spice ups
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did you open the firewall on the machines themselves?

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group=“windows management instrumentation (wmi)” new enable=yes

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group=“remote administration” new enable=yes

running these three cmds on the machines we had trouble with helped us go from 50% to 98% inventoried.

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Thank you! I will most certainly try that. Can I ask, what does the registry value do?

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I did open the firewall using group policy as per the official guide, but I don’t recall seeing anything about setting the reg value

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Welcome to Spiceworks - but I have to say this…we’re a professional forum here, let’s keep the posts as work-friendly as we can. It’s hard to help when we are sifting through the colorful metaphors.

Since this is your first post, you don’t have prior activity/posts explaining the problems that you’ve had and no one here has been given a chance to help you. You’ve come in with guns blazing, and it’s hard for us to respond in a helpful way when we assume you’re going to be on the defensive right out of the gate.

Next, you’re not alone. The Inventory mechanism is something that is being evaluated by the dev team and they know about the issues that you and a lot of other people experience. However, lots of people are able to scan just fine and have a pretty robust software inventory available to them.

Give us an idea of your current toplogy. What OS is Spiceworks running on? What domain account did you give it? What documentation (links) specifically did you follow to help you troubleshoot?

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Hey Bill. Welcome to the Community. Sorry you’re having so much trouble! Inventory is one of the big things we’re trying to fix (as Rob mentioned). There are a LOT of moving parts, and keeping them all moving is troublesome at best.

There are a bunch of things you can do to prep the way for Spiceworks scanning. Hitting some of the help documentation found here would be a good start. Specifically this , or this . Since the Forum is just one tool ( of many that we offer ) to learn/troubleshoot the app, it’s good to know what you’ve tried already and what you haven’t.

We’re all here to help. Give us some details on what you’ve tried, and what you haven’t, and we’ll get you fixed up! If you have a handful of devices (say… less than 30), the agent MAY be a good fit for you. It’s just when you start adding more than that, it can cause some performance issues in the app. A lot of the reasons I liked Spiceworks back in the day is because it lets you do things outside of it’s intended scope.

Let us know where you are in the process, and we (the Community as a whole) will help you get fixed up!

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It has to do with remote user access control or RUAC so that spiceworks has the ability to do its thing.

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Did you desert us? Hopefully your problems with Spiceworks hasn’t caused you to do something regretful and now you’re in a Turkish prison…

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