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KACE Agent for Macintosh - Inventory Reporting Software from Other Partitions and Running VM's

Suggestions to mitigate inventory reporting issues.

Several Macs in our environment have bloated inventory. The agent is reporting software from a running Windows VM as well as other partions with the Mac OS installed. The VM's as well as the other partitions do not have the KACE Agent installed nor do we need to manage them. Any suggestions to limit the inventory reporting to only the partiton the agent is installed on would be appreciated.

Posted 12 years ago 7464 views

Comments

  • Interesting. Are the Windows applications showing up if System Profiler is run? Typically I see a Windows VM show up as a separate Inventory item if it has the KACE Agent installed, but not as a subset of the Mac inventory record. Can you give us example windows programs that are showing up in the Mac inventory? Screenshots? - MacDude 12 years ago
  • It looks like System Profiler shows the software listed in the VM as well as the Mac OS. When I sort System Profiler by version it shows what software is Windows 7. A perfect example would be Firefox. The Mac copy specifies version 10. and the Windows version just beneath it does not specify a version number.
    Our managed Macintosh computers without VM have approximately 285 applications. With a VM, their showing about 600.
    I'll gather screenshots and upload as soon as I can. - mark_pell 12 years ago
  • VMware Fusion exposes apps in VM to run like native apps, showing them in Applications menu, Spotlight, etc.

    This is slick and handy at times, confusing and cluttered at other times, especially if there are many apps in VM[s].

    I have not yet tried if turning this feature off also hides the VM apps from KACE inventory. - Michal.Simek 12 years ago
  • I'm running into this problem as well, but in my case, a user has installed and built "Qt Framework", which installs hundreds of executable files in the user's home directory but are all reported by system_profiler.

    Response frrom k1000 support was that it's a "feature" in system_profiler so not a kbox bug.

    At this time all I can think of is to rename system_profiler and install a command with that name that filters the real system_profiler's output. Not very elegant.

    Snippet from the computer inventory:
    Installed Programs (1634)
    061226-subclass-qscrollarea
    071231-opengl-texture-mapping
    1
    2dpainting
    3
    3D Pinball
    4
    50onPaletteServer (1.0.3)
    and on, and on, and on - serkowski 12 years ago
  • I sincerely hope the 5.4 agent will correctly filter the results from system profiler. In the meantime we're looking into a home grown solution to make administration easier. The current agent (5.3) feels gimped and needs a lot of customized help. As soon as I find a relatively painless workaround I'll post the info. - mark_pell 12 years ago
  • Sure would be nice if there was a way to add extensions to an existing agent, so we could run custom programs to fetch certain data. Program could be required to produce XML and the agent would validate it prior to uploading to kbox in order to prevent an ill-formed inventory breaking something... - serkowski 12 years ago
  • fyi - After spending some time diving into this it looks like there is no "easy" way to mitigate the list. We wrote a script to fill in our custom inventory field on the machines for specific software so that seemed to help. - mark_pell 12 years ago
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