Introduction.

The Fedora hardware profiler is a server-client system that does a hardware
scan against a machine and sends those results to a server so the Fedora
Project server.  The sends are anonymous and should not contain any private
information other than the physical hardware information and basic OS info

https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/smolt

Smoon: Smolt Satellite Server, for private inventory

The server is a turbogears instance.  It and the client could very easily be
modified to be used as an inventory system for an enterprise environment.
Anyone interested in doing this please contact me.


Client

The client portion uses the RHN client to create a hardware object that then
gets sent to the server.  The server then generates a public UUID and admin
password and sends it back to the client.

Submitting your profile is important but it should be done monthly.  Smolt's
implementation in Fedora is such that, when enabled, it submits randomly
every month.  It is up to the packager of your distribution to come up with
a method to generate this random time frame.  In RPM's post section it looks
like:

TMPFILE=$(/bin/mktemp /tmp/smolt.XXXXX)
/bin/awk '{ srand(); if($2 == 1 && $3 == 1) print $1,int((rand() * 100) % 22 + 1),int((rand() * 100) % 27 + 1),substr($0,index($0,$4)); else print $0}' /etc/cron.d/smolt > $TMPFILE
/bin/cp $TMPFILE /etc/cron.d/smolt
/bin/rm -f $TMPFILE

Configuration:
Note to Smolt Devs: I'm not sure where to put this info, so i'm putting it here
Note to Package Maintainers: the file client/config.py should really be a symlink. Included is a sample config.py.  To use it in a distro, please copy it to /etc/smolt.cfg.sample or even just /etc/smolt.cfg .  It is this author's preference to have the actual config file be /etc/smolt.cfg .  Furthermore, right now Smolt expects there to be a client/config.py for this to all work, so above all, make sure there is a symlink to wherever you *do* place the config.  If this presents a problem for your distro, please email us :).

Configuration (REDUX):
To configure smolt, it currently looks in one place, /etc/smolt.cfg or /path/to/client/config.py.  Yes it really counts as one place.  It is a standard python file, with constants declared directly in the file.  Please see the sample config provided for... well... a sample.  It currently recognizes only one option.

Options:

SMOON_URL: a str (that is a string) that is a url to your local smoon server.  (Default: 
http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/)


Usage:
     -h,--help           Display this help menu
     -d,--debug          Enable debug information
     -p,--printOnly      Print Information only, do not send
     -s,--server=        serverUrl (http://yourSmoonServer/