If you are not aware, I work in IT. Recently, my company was looking for a good asset management software. In my research I came across a large choice of free solutions. In that free allotment I came across one that would be perfect for a small office business or even home office; it’s called IT Items Database and can be found here. The only issue is that it is web based and requires a web server to be running at all times. Luckily for me that was not an issue. I have a media PC I use for watching movies, mostly, that is up all the time and not used on a daily basis and on this machine I run VMware Server. I believe the product has reached end of life but I am sure it can still be found somewhere on the internet. Well on that machine I have a dedicated Linux Mint server. I use Linux Mint 12 on a daily basis on my home desktop machine also but I use the virtual server within VMware for dedicated services, like a web server. Well, because I have so many devices in my home (what home doesn’t these days?) that I decided to test out the ITDB for my own assets. Here is what I did.
First, I followed this guide to install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Basically, in Linux Mint, at the terminal you type:
sudo apt-get install lamp-server^
Then, if you want to manage MySQL, install phpmyadmin by typing:
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql phpmyadmin
For a complete guide just check out the link above.
Next, I went to Sivann’s software and downloaded IT Items Database and followed his installation instructions. For Linux Mint I copied the ITDB folder to /var/www and renamed the database file per his instructions. Thereafter I had to give the database file and the directory permissions so that Apache could have access to it. Here is what I performed:
sudo chown www-data itdb.db; chmod u+w itdb.db
sudo chmod u+w itdb.db
sudo chown www-data /var/www/itdb/data
sudo chmod u+w /var/www/itdb/data/
sudo chown www-data /var/www/itdb/data/files/
sudo chmod u+w /var/www/itdb/data/files/
Once that was completed I then browsed to http://localhost/itdb within my browser. The web page didn’t load for me due to an error, this is what I got:
Open database Error!: could not find driver
After further research I found I needed to install sqlite and php5-sqlite. I did so with the following command at the terminal:
sudo apt-get install sqlite php5-sqlite
Then restarted Apache with the following command:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Hit refresh on my browser and all was working.
So far, I have been really impressed with IT Items Database. It’s super easy to use and very effective for keeping track of all your devices. I highly recommend it.
Ordinary Man 