A couple of years ago, where I work, we started using OCS Inventory NG, which is a really useful application in enterprises. It allows system administrators to inventory servers and workstations, in order to plan obsolescenses and investments. In the last two years, we also started using Thinstation to recycle old computers as Citrix terminals, by booting them via PXE. Unfortunately, the OCS Inventory Agent for Unix is written in Perl. The Perl interpreter is quite big (~16MB) and can't be put into the Thinstation images without getting a performance hit on booting. Moreover, the agent doesn't work on a system with a read only filesystem (actually, the filesystem is read-write, but changes are lost when the terminal is powered off, since it's a in-RAM filesystem). So I decided to write a small agent in C++ to be able to inventory also those machines which I was not able to do with the official agent. The agent is not complete yet, but it can already produce an incomplete inventory of the machine and send it to the OCSInventory server, or save it locally. The program weights around 250kb on disk for now, and it only has zlib as dependency, which is already present on any Thinstation installation. It also uses tinyxml2, a very small and efficient XML parsing/writing library, linked statically into the executable.
Usage:
-h [--help] : Print usage
-c [--conf] : Specify configuration file
-s [--server] : Specify OCSInventory server url
If no server is specified, either via the -s option or via the
configuration file (option -c), the program will write a local
inventory in the current working directory.
Examples:
ocsinventory-agent --conf /etc/ocsinventory-ng.conf
ocsinventory-agent --server http://ocsinventory-ng/ocsinventory