3
votes

Currently we are using a wiki (Confluence) to track this information like:

  • servers
  • applications
  • configuration (IP addressees, domains used
  • owners (contacts)

The problem is that a wiki does not scale too well for editing structured data.

Is there a free alternative for this (not looking for complex commercial solutions), preferably one that could allow LDAP authentication.

Note: I know that Google Docs could be another alternative but that's out of the questions as it is hosted outside the corporate environment and there is no clear way of securing the access to the table.

Probably I need this to manage less than 100 machines, but clearly more than 20 machines and a greater number of applications.

1
  • Linux-only environment? Is there an Active Directory presence? Sharepoint, perhaps?
    – ewwhite
    Jul 26, 2012 at 9:59

2 Answers 2

4
votes

I have been using racktables for customers scaling from 50 to ~1000 servers. It does LDAP (openldap, ad, etc.) authentication and it's IP listing is second to none. Using it's dictionary feature, you can add configuration like domain, software installed etc.

Most importantly (for me anyways), are the plugins that allow automatic insertion/update of servers. See racktables github page for details.

2
  • Thanks, this looks interesting even if it seems to be limited to managing physical machines. I will have a deeper look to see if I can store information link owners, credentials or applications running on them.
    – sorin
    Jul 26, 2012 at 10:46
  • Looks interesting... too bad it's limited to a MySQL backend Jul 26, 2012 at 10:54
1
vote

I always prefer to use a database for this kind of information because it's far easier to structure and search. You could use any free database server such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. to store that data.

To access it you could create a front end with something else. For a free solution you could try something like LibreOffice Base. You could even create a nice form for the data entry and of course you have pretty good built-in reporting facilities. You could knock up something functional in half an hour and refine it as necessary when you have the time.

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