We send out computers to facilities and we would like to be able to keep the system up to date and monitored in our spiceworks inventory. Many of these facilities have their own network to which we have no access to only our machines thorough logmein. How would we go about putting these devices in our inventory?
2 Spice ups
Option 1 - Install the agent on the remote PC’s. Obviously, this requires connectivity between client and server, either a VPN or an Internet-exposed server (locked down by firewall rules and only allowing connections from your remote IP’s.
Option 2 - Install a remote collector. Accomplishes about the same thing, but doesn’t require touching each remote PC. Still requires exposing your central server’s https port to the world. Again, you can safely do this only if you can lock it down to the point where it only allows connections from your remote sites (tough, if remote sites are on dynamic IP’s). See http://community.spiceworks.com/help/Remote_Collectors
Option 3 - Set up VPN between networks. This, of course, requires a certain amount of trust on the part of whoever is responsible for securing the remote networks, but if you can swing it, it makes management of remote resources simpler in many ways. The technologies for doing this are beyond the scope of this discussion, but if it’s an option, give it serious thought. With a VPN in place, both of the above options are available to you or you could just turn your central server loose on the remote subnets. The latter is not ideal, just sayin’ it becomes an option at that point.
1 Spice up
We host our central spiceworks server in the cloud. Then all our supported sites and devices sign in to that via SSL. Then we deploy the spiceworks clients on the desktops via a GPO software install.
Works very well.
Or as above you could publish your spiceworks server via SSL and let the remote clients report in to your server.
Rob
