Client Management Suite

What is the easiest method to only collect file inventory on one FOLDER and it's contents.

Exclude's over rule an include so I'm finding it very difficult to set this up in the Folders setup for an inventory policy.

You may ask what am I doing?

I would like to run a small file inventory daily only.  To get results back.  I do not want to run a complete file inventory daily.  We do this weekly.

Reason is I need to watch a specific folder for it's contents.

Folder is:  C:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\VirusDefs

SEP has a problem with how many dats it holds and sometimes it does not clean out old DATs.  We have found this to be a problem and need to start monitoring it daily because for now Support does not have a solution for us.  The last response was we are eliminating dats in version 12 and going to whitelist.  Great but that is next year!

File detail inventory only gathers additional header information on files it already knows about.  I'm not sure it would accomplish what you want to do.  If I understand correctly, you want to ensure that the VirusDefs folder that you mentioned above doesn't grow beyond a certain size.  Is that right?  Or are you trying to determine if files within the VirusDefs folder are beyond a certain age?

Ok here is what I'm thinking and what I do right now.

I have a report that is limited to that folder location path.  It reports on a DLL in that location which will exist in each DAT.

The Dats produce a folder themselves by date into that location.  So I can look down the list and and easily see that pc xxxxxx has 5 entries and the path is different meaning it has 5 dats and should only be holding 3.

I want to do this for my servers so it is only going to be for like 35 machines I have to watch in this report.

FYI,

I have opened a new support request regarding the Include in File Detail inventory.  It does not make sense that they even have this based on what I was told before that exclusions overrule a include.

Inventory right now inventories ALL files that are not Excluded.  So what good would an include rule do if the Exclude would overrule it?

This isn't going to perform a custom inventory for you, and it won't do it on each system.  A detailed file inventory gathers the Details about a file for which the CMDB only has basic information.

Let's say the CMDB knows basic information about five files.  There are 25 computers known to the CMDB.  All 25 computers have File A, B, and C, but only Dave-PC  has File D and only Elaine-PC has File E.  The CMDB will run a detailed file inventory on Dave-PC and Elaine-PC but none of the others.  It just needs to gather the detailed information about the files.

So what you're looking at is a custom inventory which looks at file contents, or folder size.  If folder size is what you really care about, a script like this would meet your needs:

http://98.129.119.162/connect/forums/custom-inventory-samples-ns6

I don't understand why this won't work?

If machine A B C have file xxx.xxx in these 4 folder locations it will show the 4 folder locations and four files in my report.

Since the 4 folder locations are different I can see that it has 4 of these!

I can tell you I can already see what I need in my report the problem is I want to move this from my workstations to my servers but do not want to do a full file detail scan of the entire server.  I want to say only scan this ONE location.

What report are you using for your workstations, and why won't it work on your servers?

Detailed file inventory gets you the details on files, not which computers have the files.

the report is a modified version of:

 Reports 
 Discovery and Inventory 
 Inventory 
 Cross-platform 
 Software/Applications 
 General Software 
 Audit Software Search report
 

It won't work on my servers because I don't run File detail inventory on my servers right now.  I do not want to run a FULL file detail inventory on my servers.  I only want to run it for one specific location.   Please read the original post regarding this.

I need to know how to limit a inventory collection down to one specific folder easily without spending 10 days writing exclusions and checking every server to make sure I didn't miss anything.  I want this to be a fairly quick inventory pull.  Not requiring much for resources for a very long time.

I bumped on the same problem for one of my customer.

They wanted to do exactly the same: point the file detailed inventory to a single folder and get data from a file type in these folders.

This can be done in 6.0 very easily (start AeXAPEdit with a blank ini, add the file type you need and the folder to scan and you are set) however the same cannot be done in 7.0.

I tested with nly including a specific folder, still the entire drive was scan. I exluded all drives, and included a folder (work in 6) and this reported nothing back (so exclusion take precedance over inclusion?).

In the end custom inventory seem to be the only viable way to gt the data out of the systems.

ludovic_ferre,

What is the reason for having an Include then?  I have a ticket with support since 2/3 413-802-351 that no one has even acknowledged it's existance.  Probably because no one can answer the question.

Sorry to pick on you but it says you are a Symantec Employee and my free support seems to always get me better responses than my paid support.

I'll check with the Inventory team to see how this effecitvely applies (exlcudes taking precence over includes) and whether the finding comply with the design goals.

I can't comment on the other part, as you sure guessed ;).

Ok working with Symantec Support and developers in designing this they actually found out how to do this and are writing a KB regarding it.

Here is the instructions:

I would like to thank Joel Smith for all this help regarding this issue!

You can find more information in the topic "Inventory advanced options: Files Properties Scan Settings tab" that describes this issue along with other possible situations in the table "Software inventory behavior on different platforms".

Article URL http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO50042