[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] Sorry Spiceworks... - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA
Sat, Jun 21 2008 8:09 bradley

Sorry Spiceworks...

So SpiceWorks 3.0 came out and it's a nifty free app to monitor a network... and they even have a paid version if you want no ads.  So far so good.

http://www.spiceworks.com/signup/

I wish they would have worded this better though..

Does that mean that the network has to be set up that all workstation's users have admin rights, or does it mean that the ITPro administrator needs to either have domain admin credentials (a standard domain) or if in a peer netwrok he knows the administrator password for the workstation.

But on Vista... they just lost me

http://community.spiceworks.com/help/Spiceworks_Requirements

http://community.spiceworks.com/education/projects/Disabling_UAC

Spiceworks will not run correctly, or discover your remote computers running Vista if User Account Control (UAC) is turned on. Below are instructions for disabling UAC

I need to test something.. I wonder if enabled remote registry service will do the same.  Because sorry Spiceworks, I'm not disabling UAC.

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# re: Sorry Spiceworks...

Saturday, June 21, 2008 11:07 AM by Xavier

I had to add a GPO to allow "Remote Administration Exception" in the Vista firewall" in order to see Vista workstations in my SpiceWorks inventory. We have Remote Registry set to Automatic on our systems, so I am curious to see if it inflluences the ability to be scanned. In any case, UAC remains turned on on our Vista systems, and they are scanned by SpiceWorks.

# re: Sorry Spiceworks...

Saturday, June 21, 2008 11:48 AM by Anders

At work the support guys have used Solarwinds products for years. A shame that they don't have a SMB version for a few hundred bucks.

# re: Sorry Spiceworks...

Sunday, June 22, 2008 9:18 AM by Phil Berlin

Found this blog because I was researching the same issue. I use What's Up Gold for network monitoring, but was looking for a less expensive alternative. Came across pt360 from PacketTrap Networks. They have a free version and a sub $1000 verison. http://www.packettrap.com if interested.

# re: Sorry Spiceworks...

Sunday, June 22, 2008 11:37 AM by Nick Bhavsar

(Shamless product plug) - Actually, SolarWinds does have an SMB network monitoring tool called ipMonitor: www.solarwinds.com/.../ipmonitor.  It starts at $1495, although we're running a special this week for 25% off.

-Nick

# re: Sorry Spiceworks...

Tuesday, June 24, 2008 4:50 PM by Francis

Sorry Bradley,

Some of our help content was out of date and needed to be updated.  This was overlooked as we focused on getting our 3.0 release out the door.  We no longer require or recommend UAC to be turned off, but you certainly couldn't have figured that our from our content.

The Spiceworks scanner can collect information from Vista machines that have UAC on, and I also just posted instructions for installing the Spiceworks Application as a service on Vista + UAC as well - see: community.spiceworks.com/.../17777