If you get an error message from the Microsoft Installer during installation, please try to start the msi-file from a local drive (for example your desktop) and check if the SYSTEM account has sufficient rights to access the file.

Please assure that you are logged on with (or specified) an account that has administrative privileges on the target device. In a Windows domain this normally is true for members of the Domain Admins group. The account must not have an empty password.

When UAC (User Account Control) is enabled on a device, administrators accessing the device remotely are restricted in their rights. To fix this, you can either disable UAC completely or – if you don’t want to do this – you can just disable it for requests from the network. (See ⇗ http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951016)

In workgroup environments the sharing model on Windows XP is set to “Guest Only” by default. This prevents privileged access from the network. To fix this run secpol.msc, go to Local Policies/Security Options and change Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts to Classic – Local users authenticate as themselves.

On Windows clients the Windows firewall should be disabled or at least the Remote Administration exception should be enabled in the settings.

If there is a standalone (e.g. hardware) firewall in your network, please see the next topic for more information.

On a standalone firewall the following protocols and ports should pass through the firewall:

• ICMP Echo Request (i.e. ping)
• TCP/UDP Port 137 and UDP 138 (NetBIOS Name Service and NetBIOS Datagram Service)
• TCP Port 139 (NetBIOS Session Service)
• TCP Port 445 (SMB/CIFS)
• UDP Port 161 (SNMP, only for non-Windows devices)
• TCP Port 22 (SSH, only for Linux and Mac devices)

The above port list at least enables a non-WMI scan of a Windows device, which gives you a reduced hardware and a full software inventory of a device. For a complete hardware scan the WMI protocoll has to pass through the firewall. WMI uses the DCOM protocol which allocates ports dynamically by default. Starting with Windows Vista it is possible to set a fixed port for the WMI service on the client, which Microsoft describes in the following article: ⇗ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb219447%28v=VS.85%29.aspx

Yes, but on these operating systems some network protocols required for remote scans are disabled or not available. Therefore you must execute a program locally on these computers. See Collection Directories section of the User Guide for the use of an alternative way to get information from those devices.

Yes. rxInventory uses the SSH protocol to log into Linux and Mac computers when provided with a user name and password. This user need not necessarily have root privileges. But if you want to get all the hardware details of  your Linux boxes, use either the root user or edit the /etc/sudoers to allow the specified user to elevate his privileges. Please check that the requiretty option is not set.

rxInventory is licensed by the number of clients kept in the database. Network devices from which rxInventory cannot get any information other than the IP address (and sometimes MAC address) are considered as unknown and do not count to your license. They are typically shown in the “Unknown” folder of the console tree.

To shield you from the complexities of SQL, the query designer of rxInventory internally rewrites expressions with a negative predicate (Example: is not like '%Microsoft Office%') to use sub-selects. This should yield the expected results in most cases.

No. For security reasons rxInventory does not save any passwords to the database. Only the account name is stored there. An encrypted version of the password is written to a file in the All Users-profile: %ALLUSERSPROFILE%Rubinoxinventory.scangroups.config

This is the reason why scanning with custom account information does only work from the machine where the password was initially entered. If ordinary users have access to this computer please secure the above mentioned file with the appropriate access rights.