Due to the recent surge of interest in porting ZFS to the Linux kernel (if you are in the mood to read dozens of messages, see this thread, the follow-up, plus this one and one more), I'd like to offer my view on things.
What is Zenoss?
The Zenoss project provides an integrated, easy-to-deploy and cost-effective opensource alternative for enterprise IT infrastructure monitoring. Unlike the big OSS companies (IBM, HP, CA, BMC, Amdocs) we are able to keep costs down and directly involve end users throughout the world. More details can be found here.
zCI is a free computer inventory system. zCI collects inventory data from client computers automatically and store the information in MySQL database server. You can manage and play the inventory data using zCI’s sleek web-based interface.
These are some of zCI’s interesting features:
* Automatically collect hardware information, such as computer serial number, monitor serial number, CPU type, harddisk information, memory size & etc. Monitor serial number detection are rarely provided by other computer inventory programs.
* Automatically collect installed software information*.
* Client programs are available for MS Windows (JScript based) and Linux (Java based). Both client programs are less than 100KB and not necessary to be installed in the client computers. Linux client might be applicable for Unix systems.
* Server-side programs can be installed on any OS and hardware platform. zCI server only needs web-server, PHP and MySQL database.
* Data management can be done via zCI’s web-based interface with 3 access levels (all users, supervisor and administrator).
* Peripheral inventory facility. Other computer inventory software usually does not provide this facility.
* Ownership management. You can manage the ownership status (owned, lease, end of ownership, end of lase) of computer, monitor and peripheral entities.
Here's a dirty script I wrote to install nagios and Lilac on a clean CentOS 5.4 install. This script doesn't care about anyone other than itself (it'll change the mysql password for instance) so may not be entirely perfect for your needs.