[TriLUG] Recommend hardware inventory/asset tracking system

[John Brier]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 10:22 AM, John Broome <jbroome at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 20:04, John Brier <johnbrier at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> this might not meet all your needs but it does manage servers:
>>
>> https://fedorahosted.org/beaker/
>
> "Fedora *proposed* project Beaker"
>
> The only downloads are pulling source from git and building?  Yikes.

Well it may be new in Fedora but it's used by Engineering at Red Hat
internally for a while and I guess is newly open sourced, thus the
"proposed" status.


 It does a lot and depends on some well known (and stable) projects:

==
    The Beaker framework is built upon several components which are
listed below:

    * Lab_Controller - The lab lontroller maintains Inventory data
about Distros available to install and systems to install on. Can be
used by itself, or in conjunction with the scheduler. The lab
controller is built on top of several existing tools:
          o cobbler - Does the actual provisioning
          o conserver - Provides console logging
          o fence-agents - Power cycles machines to start PXE installs
and to recover
          o smolt - Provides the inventory data
    * Scheduler - the scheduler, accepts jobs, holds the repository of tests.
    * Test_Harness - The test harness is responsible for executing
tests on a system
          o BeakerLib - shell-level integration testing library, which
can be used when writing Beaker tests
===

https://fedorahosted.org/beaker/wiki/Faq

I've personally used it as a suport engineer at Red Hat.. We are
integrating our test systems into the Engineering instance of Beaker
and from what I've seen, I like it. Granted I have never used a
similar tool from anywhere else.

JB