Linking alerts to changes

Finished the basics of linking generated alerts to changes.
What this means is that on the "list alerts" page, you can select multiple alerts and a form will appear so you can associate them to :
The "changes" table functionality in OAv2 (not complete),
An external system (via ID and/or URL),
A simple acknowledgement within the "alert" table in OAv2.

Very ITIL like. Very nice.

At the end of the day, you can audit machines, get a listing of alerts (which are changes to audited fields) and associate these with a Change System - either the basic one within OAv2 or an external one.

Next up is to start the Change System within OAv2. It's going to be simple (at least to start). Basically a recording of proposed changes - what, where, how, why, who, etc. Pretty simple from a coding perspective - CRUD mainly with a small amount of User credential checking. I don't plan on workflow style Changes (at least yet).

Once that is done, Alpha 4 will be inbound.

Alpha 3 available

Yep, you read right - it's available.
Go grab it and give it a thrashing.
All previous Bugs should have been addressed.

http://www.open-audit.org/OAv2_03.zip

Import / Export in OAv2

I have the import and export routines working for Devices, Locations and Organisations. Excel only at this stage.

One interesting aspect was the need to alter the network group creation routine. Think of a network device that you know about, but don't know specific IP details. IE - you know it's IP Address, but what about it's configured subnet ? What about it's MAC Address ? A lot of people will not know the details. So now network group creation has to account for IP Addresses in the system table - not just the sys_hw_networkcard_ip table. Interesting, but all good and working.

Any report type page (ie - a list of "All Devices") now has a shiny little button (an Excel icon). Click it and you can download & open the resulting Excel spreadsheet. At the moment it's a straight data dump, so things like column headings come direct from the DB. I will have to make another option that removes certain columns and alters the column headings (IE - man_ip_address would become IP Address, system_id would disappear altogether, etc). This would make two styles of output - a dump and a report. Will address this later on.

I think that's good enough for a release. Give me a few hours (when I get home from work) and I'll post again with release details.

Any help debugging would be appreciated.

Nearly ready for another release

What have I been doing on OAv2 ?
Well, for one thing, creating routines so you can import your devices / locations / organisations from a spreadsheet. Most places can easily conjure up a listing of relevant data - most often in a spreadsheet. The import routines for Locations and Organisations are complete, I just need to finish off Devices (which I have working in test code).

I also have nearly finished the routine to export any Report to Excel, PDF or CSV. Thanks PHPExcel !

I've also completed the Group Edit pages so they don't break auto-created Groups.

Give me a couple of days to finish up and another release will be available.

Update

Have created a couple of new reports in OAv2.
All reports are based on a Group of systems or optionally, all systems you are authorised to view, regardless of group:

• System Shares
• Orphaned Users

These now live alongside :

• Partiton Useage,
• Partiton Alert (partitions below %20 free space),
• Local Admins
• Audit Dates
• System Locations

I fixed a bug in the audit script that would not retrieve share permissions when there was a space in the Share Name.

I altered the audit script to retrieve the size of remote Shared Directories.

One thing to note is the increase of script execution time when retrieving the size of remote shared directories. I've seen it take 10 minutes (on a large file server - multiple terrabytes) to complete... I run it overnight, so it isn't an issue for me, but I may make it an optional thing to enable...

ToDo for OAv2

I think if I can get these done, I'll call it a 0.3 release...

• Fix the Alter Groups code (as per OAv2 release notes).
• Display all the "man_" fields for a system (as per OAv2 release notes). "man_" fields are meant to be manually updated data - stuff like physical location, etc, that cannot be derived from querying a system.
• Revise the menu structure.
• Fix the installed software SQL (as per OAv2 release notes).
• Create a form to manually add a system. You can do this currently by taking an audit result XML file and replacing the details for the manual system - but it's ugly, annoying and a hack.

Presenting at SAGE-AU

I have been asked to present at the SAGE-AU conference in August on Open Source Tools. My talk will be about Configuration Management and CMDB's... I wonder if Open-AudIT will get a plug ? :-)

FYI - SAGE-AU Conference is on from the 9th - 13th of Auagst in Hobart, Tasmaina.
http://www.sage-au.org.au/conference-2010/

They're (the organisers) still finalising details around schedule, presenters, etc, etc.