Auditing LAN assets - a simple example

Auditing LAN assets - a simple example

In a simple possible scenario, you would have a single network and one person in the IT Department who wants to audit and track all the equipment on this network.

In this case, you could install ENT Server Desktop Edition on a single machine on that network and configure it to use your company's MSDE or MSSQL Server database server or.

If you don't have an MSSQL Server, you could install MSDE on the machine where ENT Server Desktop Edition is installed.
You could then use the Desktop Edition of ENT NetCenter to audit the other Windows machines on your network remotely.

In the above scenario, if you had any computers on the network that were running Windows XP or Windows 2003 then you would have to make sure to configure an exception for administrative traffic in the Windows Firewalls on these machines.

Alternatively, if you did not want to audit machines remotely, you could deploy the machine auditing agent, EntAudit.exe, to each of the machines that you wanted to audit and configure this to run at regular intervals using the Windows Scheduler on each of the machines.

You could then periodically collect the audit snapshot files that were generated by the machine auditing agents on the network, add these to your ENT Inventory using ENT NetCenter.

Note that although ENT Network Monitor could be used to automate this process, ENT Network Monitor requires you use the Corporate Edition of the software, so we'll provide an example of that in the next section.