Hi ken-ji!

Your idea might be quite interesting, but we just don't see any other advantages of this except for some potential improvements in scanning speed. If the node responds to WMI request, it'll be scanned as a Windows system. If SSH is not responding or is disabled at the scanning side, Network Inventory Advisor will move on to SNMP. But what exactly do you need to accomplish that you cannot do now?

Because it's very slow and doesn't seem to work when the Linux server has Samba.
The scan insists on attempting to login via SMB, which works and fails to get WMI data.
the scan then stops there. (We setup samba to allow root to login as well)

Plus its better to try SSH first before everything else since almost all windows machines do not have SSH, but almost all Linux machines have SSH

Let me talk to my developers to find out what they think about this.

An update from our developers: we could surely use SSH scanning as the first method, but that should only provide you with the better speed of scanning on non-Windows networks and only the first time you scan them, as later on every node is scanned by the method that relates to its type. Still trying to see the exact win-win algorithm here...

How about this.
we should make the order user configurable - so that if they know the mix on the network, they can tune the performance. ie. if a subnet has only windows PCs we can tell the scan to work with WMI only. if Linux only, then maybe just SSH.

I'm thinking from a background where the admin does not have a clear idea of what the OS are there in any subnet.

Also, since we have a huge variety of linux distros installed, it would be nice if we could make the ssh scan run a configurable script so we can extract whatever info we want as long we know how to find what we want - probably this is applicable to Windows and Mac scanning too.

Finally you mentioned the node gets scanned by the method that relates to its type. this is a problem if we can't be smarter than software to tell it what the type is supposed to be ie we currently have problems when it is decided that a Linux PC is a windows PC or a snmp device.

I hope this makes my position clear.

ken-ji said: we should make the order user configurable - so that if they know the mix on the network, they can tune the performance. ie. if a subnet has only windows PCs we can tell the scan to work with WMI only. if Linux only, then maybe just SSH.

This is what we are thinking about right now: let you specify which IP addresses should be scanned using specific method. Probably this will become available in the scanning wizard when adding IP ranges.

ken-ji said: since we have a huge variety of linux distros installed, it would be nice if we could make the ssh scan run a configurable script so we can extract whatever info we want as long we know how to find what we want - probably this is applicable to Windows and Mac scanning too.

That's also a potential feature for future updates. I'll keep you posted on this.

ken-ji said: Finally you mentioned the node gets scanned by the method that relates to its type. this is a problem if we can't be smarter than software to tell it what the type is supposed to be ie we currently have problems when it is decided that a Linux PC is a windows PC or a snmp device.

This only happens after a successful initial scan.