Pinglist :: Command Line Tool

Ah the command line, wonderfully powerful and often so cryptic it bends your mind like a pretzel…

But we geeks love to use it none the less.

Pinglist is a little handy tool I whipped up a few days ago.

One of the hard things to do on the command line which should dead simple is to ping a list of machines and return if they are up or down.

Well with Pinglist you can!

Its really an extension of the traditional Windows “ping” command that is used by every single tech across the globe.

What it does is looks in the specified directory for a nominated text file name and outputs a CSV sheet with the discovered results.

Pinglist syntax looks like this:

To break it down further:

pinglist is of course the name of the tool

input is the name of the .txt file you want to query without .txt  - this file should list of machines (one machine name per line)

output is the name of the .csv you wish to output

When you are running the tool its output will look as below:

And the CSV Output looks like:

Raw CSV:

CSV in Excel:

So if you like what you see, grab a copy here…

Click here to Download Pinglist 0.25b

(File Size: 188kb)

Software Asset Management – A Primer – Part 1

I know why you’re here, you typed into Google “Software Asset Management” expecting hundreds of links to methods, processes and software tools that help manage software in an easy concise and straight forward manner.

You probably then clicked on a few links and had plenty of websites tell you how important Software Asset Management is and that it can save you or your company thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then they will tell you that its their solution that is the best for you to invest in and that it will end the issues that you are experiencing with your deployed software.

Well, while some of the tools will get you some of the way, you won’t fix your problems.

Its true that you need excellent tools to best capture information about the software in your environment, but its not the only thing you need.

So many business have struggled with Software Asset Management, and even when the combination of good policy, great tools and staff culture change are in place; it can still be a worrying task to complete.

So why is SAM so hard?

The overshadowing concern, before you think about policy, procedure, process and tools, STANDARDS.

Why such a problem?… Because there are no standards.

Firstly there is no standard by which software companies should license themselves. I’m sure we’ve all seen situations where you’ve said ” I wish X Company would license their software like Y Company”, I know I’ve said this more than I’ve liked.

No standards equals the ability for a software manufacturer to choose how they license their software, and traditionally the larger the company and more popular in industry the software the harder it is to control your licensing.

But why make it harder to license and be compliant for software you buy?

It all comes down to the almighty dollar. If its harder to license then you’ll spend money to make it easier, but are you really making it easier or just giving the software manufacturer the keys to a self-operating money making machine?

Here is caveat number two, with harder to license software it inherently becomes harder to ever know your true obligations of the licenses you purchase.

How many people do you know who can speak ‘Legalese’ the language of contracts and licenses? I know very few people who can digest this information an turn it into meaningful statements about licenses, even more so I’m yet to find two people who agree on the exact particulars of a software license.

Most people understand the overall idea of a software product:

1. You purchase a piece of software.
2. You open the box to install.
3. You agree to a page of text that you don’t read or understand.
4. You start to use the software.

This is the single largest mistake people and companies alike make when buying software.

Once you agree to the conditions the software product comes with, then you are legally bound by the End User Licensing Agreement (ELUA).

Do all software companies provide a similar method to producing and enforcing a EULA? Nope, once again it comes down to there being no standards.

A EULA can be as simple as the following:

1. You agree to be bound to this document
2. You agree not to reverse engineer this software
3. You agree not to copy or sell this software

But as most it can be excruciatingly painful in its detail and complexity, only adding to the frustration of any person wishing to know what they may or may not do with their newly purchased software.

Have you read the EULA for each piece of software you’ve deployed? Wait a minute, you just said that you use freeware and open source.

Yep EVERY piece of software has a license and a EULA, even if its freeware or open source, don’t be fooled just because you didn’t need to pay for it.

Here are the short answers:

Do you need to read the EULA? Yes.

Do you need to adhere to the EULA’s terms? Yes.

Can a EULA be written that makes my use of this software difficult? Absolutely.

The 2nd reason is quantity and distribution…

Distribution is your enemy, how many machines do you have that use software you’ve purchased, all of them probably do unless you have made the change to open source or freeware operating systems.

So how many? one machine? one hundred? one thousand or more?

Anything from one to one hundred machines is quite controllable, you’ll probably know the people who use the specific software on the systems and they probably feel a sense of ownership of the software on their machines.

Up to one hundred people also are quite quick to respond to change in processes or procedure.

Anything over one hundred people and you start to run into a few larger issues, who needs the software? how many do you distribute it to? will they understand the limitation of the software use?

Have over one thousand people in your business or company? then the road is hard and fraught with pain, but this also may be to your advantage.

The 3rd reason is discovery…

Ok so you have a network full of software, how do you find out what is on each machine? What quantity do you have out in your network? Can you target a single PC for discovery?

Without spot on discovery, you’ll feel like you are up the proverbial creek without a paddle of any description.

The 4th and final reason is metrics…

Metrics are important, don’t let anyone say otherwise, you need metrics.

Killer metrics will only serve you best when all other things slot into place, know where you’ve come from, where you are and where you are going and metrics will be the proof in the pudding.

There is light at the end of the tunnel…

Its just how long the tunnel is.

The above statements seem quite final, and depending on your distribution you can have a nightmare on your hands, but worry not there is room to breathe.

Where to start, where to start… Locked Environments and Baselining is the key to making sure you are managing your software assets correctly.

Look out for the next part of this primer!

In the next part of this primer I will be discussing further the concepts and methods of Locked Environments, Baselining, SOE (State of Environment) benefits, Bulletproof Distribution and more!

If you have any ideas or further questions so far add it to the comments!

Ghosts of Open Source

Open Source has been a hot topic across software industries for a long time.

As an evolution from the freeware revolution to promote source code for released applications, Open Source has been adopted by not only bleeding edge technologists and coding enthusiasts but also by a wider population of people looking for low/no cost software solutions with a defined support backbone.

This is where freeware differs greatly from Open Source, traditionally freeware is developed by a small number of coders, often only a single coder patching and incrementing version.

Open Source however is community based by nature, where several hundred, or even thousand coders can come together to both support and improve upon a product through bug fixing and code development.

This type of development has become more popular with the advent of online open source project code hosting such as GitHub.

While this is perfectly fine on home and small business platforms, where does Open Source fit in mission critical production systems for large corporations?

There are plenty of arguments as to why businesses should support Open Source applications, but also plenty against.

On the plus side Open Source can provide low to no cost alternatives to expensive software, the most stand out would be when choosing office suites.

• Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Plus – approx. $700.00+
• Open Office 3.2 – $0.00

And while this looks appealing on the surface, what do you lose in the trade off?

Well lets examine this, while you are provided with a suite of alternatives for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access you also lose features that each individual application provides.

This can be devastating in the business world when time and productivity is lost attempting to open documents with features that the Open Source application does not provide.

A good example of this is within Excel 2007, a standard feature is to use conditional formatting to provide colouring to a series of data, Open Office cannot replicate this feature, and although it can open Excel 2007 documents it fails to be truly compatible.

But is this really a problem?

Well yes and no. If your business is centered around the creation of documents for internal use between your staff members, then something like Open Office is a perfect alternative, you’ll only ever use features available in the application.

But if your business requires you to share documents to and from third parties then it bucking the trend to save money can be detrimental.

So where can Open Source fit into your organization? In the cracks…

Everyone knows the frustration of having to complete a specific task that eludes even some of the most expensive software titles. This is where Open Source software excels.

As with freeware, Open Source applications are usually born from frustration of limited or badly coded paid software, that one feature that nothing really does well or that one task that everything can do, but not do well.

This is where businesses would be best to take advantage of Open Source.

Need a CD/DVD Burning solution for your organisation? Sick of purchasing expensive CD/DVD authoring software to find its full of bloat? Try InfraRecorder for a bloat free burning application thats every bit as good as its paid alternatives.

Need a good unicode compliant programmers notepad? Dedicated IDE’s too expensive? Give Notepad++ a go for well developed and mature notepad replacement that provides a strong programming environment with code highlighting for over 30 different coding languages!

WHAT ABOUT SUPPORT?, I hear you say.

Well support is an interesting conundrum with Open Source products, its true that with a paid software solution you also generally are provided with a support channel with the manufacturer / software vendor, does this usually help resolve issues?

If its a configuration issue then yes but if its a coding bug or flaw then probably not, the manufacturer may choose to add your issue to its bug tracking or just disregard the request hoping it will go away in time.

As long as they are still making money, then the wheel still turns.

Open Source software is also usually well supported, the difference here is that its community supported. The people who have created the software,  actively develop or review code for the application and general users of the program form the basis of support in Open Source.

This does have one clear advantage, support is only a forum away (or several if its a widely used product), and it can be almost guaranteed that if you have encountered an issue then multiple others will have also and its already been escalated to the developers, this means that if its a big enough issue you can expect a version update soon.

Until then however you may need to mitigate the issue with another piece of Open Souce / freeware or resolve the issue in another way.

So whats left?…

Well the 900 pound gorilla in the room is the question, should businesses look to Open Source for all the answers?

That is an easy question to answer… No

Businesses need to weigh the pros and cons of implementing Open Source software in their organisation.

• Do I have a clearly defined need?
• Is the paid solution cost prohibitive?
• Does the paid solution only partially resolve the issue?

If the answer to more than one of these questions is yes then you have nothing to lose but a little time.

If the answer to more than one is no however, then you need to test each solutions and choose the most appropriate for your business.