osx software inventory

[rabosaur]

Hi – I’m looking at Lansweeper for software inventory of our build farm. Since the primary reason for this is to inventory our OS X and linux machines, I’m starting there.

When I add the ip of my personal desktop mac, it works fine, and I get an inventory of what’s installed on the box.

When I use one of our build macs, I get the hardware information, but it never gets an inventory of software. Even after 12 hours.

I also never see any errors.

I’ve tried the reports listed in the community forum, with no results. I’ve dumped the mac tables in the database as well. No results.

I’ve verified that the account I’m using in ssh has admin permissions on the box ( it does )

I’ve searched the forum, but I get nothing.

I like the tool, but if it can’t work reliably then its of no use to us. Can you help ?

[Susan_A · Accepted solution]

Just an FYI for everyone: a fix for the software scanning issue on El Capitan has now been implemented in a production version of Lansweeper. You can update your installation by following the instructions in this knowledge base article.

Keep in mind though that scanning a Mac computer's software will still require Spotlight to be enabled on the computer. Without Spotlight, the system_profiler command we use to retrieve software records doesn't work. We're not sure we can work around this issue.

[Bert_D]

Hi,

I would advise people that have this problem to contact support@lansweeper.com. (refer this post)
We have a new version that contains a fix for this issue.

[Susan_A]

I wanted to add some additional information, as rabosaur mentioned this via email: it does appear to be the case as well, for all OS X releases, that the command we use to scan software data only returns information if Spotlight is enabled on the machine.

We're not sure whether we can work around this issue or use an alternate command. If not, we'll see if we can add information on enabling Spotlight to the asset page, if software data cannot be retrieved. If enabling Spotlight negatively impacts performance on your machines, you could exclude folders from Spotlight search, as explained here for instance.

[Filip_V]

We've posted more information in this thread:
www.lansweeper.com/Forum/yaf_postsm44398_Macintosh-Software.aspx

[Susan_A]

Just as an FYI for everyone else, as we already received and answered this question via email: there are some known issues with software scanning on Mac at the moment. The command we use to retrieve the software is valid, but doesn't return data in all cases. Our development team is currently investigating and testing various OS X releases. We should have more information by the end of this week.