Create your Asset Inventory Management platform for FREE!!!
There are tons of options out there where you can manage all your assets inventory on your own company or workplace like Asset Panda, ManageEngine, Ivanti, GoCodes, and much more. But the downside to it it that you will have to pay for subscriptions to these cloud-hosted platforms in order to keep maintaining your assets. But what if your company is on a budget and your are the IT admin and the management asked you if you create a platform where all assets, equipment, and physical machines can be managed? This is where this get to.
Today, I will be showing you how to create, manage, and maintain an asset management platform that is hosted on a Linux-based machine, physical or virtual machine. For this, I will be using VMWare ESXi hosted platform to create this but you can definitely do this on a cloud VM like AWS, Azure VM, or even on a Linode machine. I will be using an open-source platform called SnipeIT. You can find the whole repository on Github. So let’s get started.
Create a virtual machine
- For this tutorial, I am using VMWare ESXi to create my own Linux virtual machine to host my asset inventory platform.
2. I used Rocky Linux 9.3 since it is most similar and the same as a CentOS/RHEL machine. I wouldn’t go into details here on how I created a virtual machine on a ESXi host but I am just showing on some important details.
3. You can see here below that I have created a VM that has the few limited resources since this machine will not have Linux GUI (because it does not need to), and will not be resource intensive like any other servers. This should be enough to get you started with this project.
- 2 vCPU
- 4GB RAM
- vHDD 16GB
4. After you create your own VM, make sure you create a snapshot(VMWare), or checkpoint (HyperV) , or whatever you wanna call it. This ensure a safe rollback whenever you made a mistake on configuring your machine. Without this, you might have to go back from the start when setting it up which is not so ideal and time consuming. So always make your rolllback plan. Start
Start up your virtual machine and configure the basic configuration.
5. It’s totally up to you if you want to create a server with GUI for easier management but it would be less resource intensive when you create your Linux server on a bare minimum install so you wouldn’t have to deal with some bloatware that might be included.
From Rocky Linux, I have set up the network information, set root password, set SSH as root (not recommended), keyboard layout and language. When you are done, click OK and it will take you few minutes until you are done with initial installation.
Install Asset Management (Snipe-IT)
- Before doing anything else, make sure you fully update your machine and install some important stuff to get this done.
# Update all repositories
sudo dnf update -y && sudo dnf upgrade -y
yum install wget tar git net-tools2. After this, change to /tmp directory and download the installer.
The installer is intended ONLY for fresh linux CentOS/Redhat or Debian/Ubuntu systems that have no other sites running on them. It will automatically pull the latest from the master branch.
# Change directory to /tmp because the script runs from /tmp directory
cd /tmp
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/snipe/snipe-it/master/install.sh
chmod 744 install.sh
./install.shRunning the install.sh script above will complete all the installation from installing the Apache2 web server, MariaDB database, PHP, Composer for PHP manager, and all other dependencies. This will also ask you if you want to create your own database or have the script create it for you. When you are done, you should be able to log in to the site welcome page through the set IP address of your server.
If you want to access the site using a domain name, make sure you add the DNS lookup entry on your DCs or from your DNS provider platform like CloudFare, etc.
3. Here below you can see the welcome screen of Snipe-IT. This is where you can create the initial database and create your local user account.
Click Next on Create Database Tables. This should be automatic.
4. After the initial welcome page screen, you are done! You have successfully create your own asset inventory management platform for your company.
You have tons of things that you can do on this platform. Here are some of the options and functions that you can create for this.
- Branding — set the logo, title of the platform, colors, fonts.
- Barcodes — can used for some of your equipment
- MFA — 2FA security for the users who logs in to the platform.
- LDAP — you can connect this platform to your local DC so your domain admin users can manage the platform whilst not worrying of normal users making changes on this platform.
- Backups — this is necessary when you do not have redundancy or backup software for your machines and that you can always back up for inventory so you can always restore it as BCP.
That is it! Congraluations!! You have managed to create your own asset inventory management platform safely without worrying of any incurring cost that might affect your business’ budget. I hope you enjoy this and please subscribe for more similar content and support for more.
Thank you.
PS: Please see the original Github repository and websites for more info.
