It's been a while since I have posted to this blog. Mostly it has been because we had some major staff movements that have taken some time to work through to the point where making some space to write here is now somewhat realistic!
I want to share an improvement to a script I blogged in Feb 2007 which was about using a Windows Powershell script to query the WMI Win32_Product so as to retrieve information about all the software on a computer.
The original script output to a HTML file and has served us well, but I have occasionally thought that it would be great to also be able to write some or all of the data to a MySQL database. Recently I played around with this idea and managed to achieve a reasonable result.
I decided to use the .NET assembly available for this purpose from the MySQL site. The reason I decided to use the .NET assembly was that although the assembly can be installed using the installer the reality for distribution purposes was the the installer in fact copies in and then registers a .DLL file which if you want, can just be directly copied onto the target systems. Providing you specify the exact location of this file in the Powershell script, the fact that it is not "registered" does not matter!
Setup
- As the script writes output to a MySQL server located on another machine. You can get the setup for the MySQL server from my personal website.
- You can get a copy of the GetInventory_DB.ps1 Powershell script and copy this script to the desired location on the machine(s) you wish to get inventory data from.
- Also you will need to either install the MySQL .NET connector or download it and just copy in the .NET assembly .DLL file called "MySql.Data.dll" to the desired location on the machine(s) you wish to get inventory data from.
Note: If you use different file locations for these files than what the script uses, you will need to edit the script accordingly. Also you will need to edit the location of the MySQL server...
We schedule the script to run from the AT command once a day on the local machines when the workstations are not in use. This means that the data is up to date with any changes made in the previous 24 hours. Intially we are accessing the MySQL database using an ODBC connector and a MS Access Database. I have since written a PHP script that interacts with the MySQL database. Rename the script "search.php" and edit it in the places commented so as to reflect your database, username and password and it should work! (This script was copied directly from my test server...).
