Using OCS Inventory in Debian Edu?

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

The last few weeks, the ocsinventory packages has been installed by
default in the Lenny based Debian Edu.  This is because it was
recommended by the admins in Extremadura, as a possible replacement
for sitesummary.  There are a few issues that need to be resolved
before this can be part of the final release:

 - The server is impossible to install automatically using
   debian-installer.  It require mysql to be _running_ at install
   time, and d-i do not allow any daemons to start in /target/ during
   installation.  Reported to the maintainer as #489461.

 - How should the clients locate the server?  I suspect we want a new
   service name DNS alias, a SRV record or some broadcast method to
   find it, to avoid hardcoding setup on the clients.  Any
   suggestions?  We use 'sitesummary' as the DNS alias for the
   sitesummary collector.  Perhaps 'ocsinventory' as a DNS alias is
   good enough?  At the moment the client ask for the server name
   because no preseeding is done to set it.  I want to keep it that
   way until we find a solution, to make sure we do not forget the
   issue.

If no solution to the installation issue is found, we need to drop the
package from the default installation.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen