1

So I was hoping to use this program for my home network so I can be able to monitor bandwidth and remote desktop into multiple computers I have at my house from one router. However when I try to use the scanning step (when you first open Spiceworks) it only scans my own computer. I mean before it starts scanning it tells me:

“Spiceworks depends on remote administrative privileges to gather useful, detailed information about your network.”

I kinda have no idea what that means. Does that I mean I actually have to setup a domain on my own home network to take advantage of this program??

2 Spice ups
2

Nope, you can use it with workgroups, but you either

  • have to have the same name and password with admin rights on each machine

  • or set up a separate scan profile (with appropriate username/password) for each machine

3

“Spiceworks depends on remote administrative privileges to gather useful, detailed information about your network.”

For spiceworks to scan/inventory a machine it needs Administrator privileges on that computer. As you said in a domain (w/ Active Directory for example) the network administrator’s account grants admin privileges on all the machines that use that AD.

However as Gareth explained each computer already has a local admin account (often 2 or more on Windows PCs) - one named Administrator (by default) and possibly the user account you logon with may have admin privileges. No need to setup a domain.

As spiceworks finds each machine on your home network it will try to login to that machine with the name and password you used to login to your own machine (the one spiceworks is running from). If it doesn’t find your user-name/password on each of your other machines it will chock and return an error.

You can see the errors in the bottom right of the spiceworks dashboard (there will be 6 tiny icons in a row - the 1st, an orange triangle, are the scan errors).

What you can do is

  1. go to the Inventory tab (upper left-center) or go to the scan-errors icon,
  2. click on one of your machines
  3. you will see a Red Bar if spiceworks couldn’t get in,
  4. click on the Manage Accounts button on the red bar, a pop-up window appears & you can type in the user-name + password used to get into that specific machine
  5. right before your eyes spiceworks will try to authenticate (get into) that machine,
  6. if it Fails you will get immediate feedback and can try a different set of credentials to get in
  7. if it Succeeds it tells you so, tells you that this machine is being inventoried, and that the successful user name will be tried on the other machines in your home’s network.
  8. if all your machines have different user-names (admin level user-names) you will need to click on each machine and repeat the red bar process.

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spiceworks5-feedback-bar-top-tabs.png

4

Thank you both for replying and helping!