Install GLPI (IT and Asset Management) Tool with Fusion Inventory in Debian Linux

Step 6: Installation and Configuration of Fusion Inventory

17. Now that GLPI is up and running, it is time to add the Fusion Inventory plug-in. Heading back over to the Debian server, the Fusion Inventory plugin can be obtained with another simple wget command.

# cd /var/www/glpi/plugins
# wget -c http://forge.fusioninventory.org/attachments/download/1755/fusioninventory-for-glpi_0.85+1.1.tar.gz 

18. Now that Fusion Inventory has been downloaded, the contents of the tarball need to be extracted and then ownership changed in order for Apache2 to have access to the new plug-in on GLPI’s behalf:

# tar xzf fusioninventory-for-glpi_0.85+1.1.tar.gz
# chown -R www-data:www-data fusioninventory 

This above chown command will change the ownership of all the files in the newly extracted folder. The ‘tar‘ command above must be run BEFORE this command!

19. Now all of the files are ready for GLPI to install the Fusion Inventory module. Head back over to the second computer (the one with the web browser) and log-in to GLPI.

At the top of the screen, there are several menu options for GLPI. One of these options will say ‘Setup‘. Hover over this menu and wait for the drop down menu to appear and at the bottom will be a ‘plug-ins‘ option.

20. The next screen will be the installed and ready to be installed list of plug-ins for GLPI. Assuming that Fusion Inventory was placed in the proper directory in the above paragraphs (/var/www/glpi/plugins) this page will show the Fusion Inventory plug-in waiting to be installed.

21. Click the ‘Install‘ button to install Fusion Inventory into GLPI. The page should refresh and then Fusion Inventory will need to be ‘enabled‘ which is done by clicking the newly visible ‘enable‘ button.

Notice that the ‘Status‘ field for Fusion will say ‘Installed / not activated‘ until the ‘Enable‘ button is selected!

22. Once the ‘Enable‘ button is selected, the Fusion Inventory plug-in will now be activated and ready for configuration.

In GLPI, a new ‘Plugins‘ menu will be visible and hovering over the menu will present a drop-down menu labeled ‘FusionInventory‘. Clicking on this option will likely present the following error screen since Fusion does not have a URL for agents to access the system configured yet.

23. To fix this issue, hover over the ‘Administration‘ menu option. When the drop down menu appears, select the ‘Entities‘ dialog. When the page loads, select ‘Root Entity‘ and then on the left side of the webpage, select the ‘FusionInventory‘ selection.

This will allow for the service URL to be set. The service URL in this tutorial can simply be the server’s IP address however, if a functional DNS system (such as BIND9) is setup, an actual URL can be used here as long as the appropriate changes are made in the DNS system as well.

Finally, GLPI and Fusion are ready to go. The next task is to start importing inventory into the system. This tutorial will continue with installing the Fusion Inventory Agent and confirming that the agent properly sends the inventory information to the server.

Step 7: Fusion Inventory Agent Installation

24. Now that all of the difficult stuff is out of the way, it is time to actually test the GLPI/Fusion Inventory system! Fusion has an agent for almost every operating system out there and all of them can be located on the following URL:

1. http://www.fusioninventory.org/documentation/agent/installation/

25. However, this tutorial will walk through configuring the agent on a Linux machine as the inventory agent is already in the repositories for most distributions.

The agent will be installed on a Linux Mint 17.1 machine in this example. This is a Debian/Ubuntu based distro and it uses the ‘apt‘ meta-packager to obtain packages from the repositories.

# apt-get install fusioninventory-agent

This will install all the necessary dependencies as well as the necessary configuration file for Fusion Inventory. It will be necessary to modify the configuration file in order to tell the agent where the Fusion server resides. The configuration file is located at ‘/etc/fusioninventory/agent.cfg‘ and can be opened with any text editor.

# nano /etc/fusioninventory/agent.cfg

Just to get a machine inventoried, there is only one line that needs to be changed in this particular file and that is the ‘server =‘ line.

For this example the server line should be configured as follows (be sure to substitute the ip for the proper ip or hostname):

server = http://192.168.1.5/plugins/fusioninventory/front/plugin_fusioninventory.communication.php

Save the changes to this file and exit out of the text editor.

26. At this point as long as there is network connectivity to the Debian server, Fusion Inventory agent should be ready to inventory this Linux Mint machine. The command to run the agent is ‘fusioninventory-agent‘.

After running this command there wont be much, if any, output. When the command line returns to the normal prompt, it is time to check GLPI/Fusion to see if the machine was inventoried.

There are a couple of places to see whether or not the inventory worked. The first place to look is the agents view in Fusion Inventory. This will show whether or not the client actually connected to the server. To get to this view click on the following menu options: Plugins → FusionInventory → Agent.

27. This screen shows that the Fusion Inventory agent successfully connected to the server from the test Linux Mint machine. The other place to check is within GLPI’s Assets menu; after all this is where the inventory of machines, software, and peripherals should reside! To access this menu, simply hover over ‘Assets‘ menu in the top left of the web browser and then select ‘computers‘ when the drop down menu appears.

This will bring up the main inventory page. The newly inventoried machine will be the only entity on this page for the time being but should be there never the less.

Success! There is the Linux Mint machine with a small amount of details about the machine. To view more complex details about this machine, simply click on the name of the machine in the column on the far left.

This will present a detailed view of this particular machine’s inventory. Everything from monitors, USB drives, scanners, and software will be displayed here and any information about those devices will also be available.

At this point, GLPI and Fusion are working harmoniously and should be ready for more agents to begin transmitting information from other machines! There are currently agents available for all the major operating systems available as well as source code for those who wish to compile from source.

Thank you for sticking through this rather lengthy tutorial and hopefully this tutorial has resulted in a working GLPI/Fusion Inventory system. Please feel free to ask any questions and best of luck inventorying assets!

Resource Link: GLPI HomePage