phpEquiMon

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Overview

phpEquiMon is a PHP webapplication aimed at network administrators that need to keep track of equipment. It allows multiple users to manage an inventory database for IP-based equipment. Available database fields include hostname, IP address, MAC address, "used by", location and many many more.

But phpEquiMon is much more than just a simple PHP gui to a database backend. It has gained quite some additional powerful features that make administator's life easier and allow everyone to keep track of the equipment status without technical knowhow.

Features:

Manage your IP-based equipment (workstations, servers, managed switches, remote power switches etc.) in a database with advanced feature for large amounts of data (splits records over pages, record cloning, group editing, group deleting).
Allows the user to choose from various layout presets determining which table fields to display in which order and allows the user to design new table layouts and save them.
User/group system with no restriction on the number of possible users, groups or groups for a user to be a member of. No "special" admin user but a admin group which arbitrary user can be put into.
Online monitoring: Automatic periodical ping of all equipment to determine availability. If desired, you get an notification per mail if hosts go down.
Monitoring of managed machines via WBEM (requires server, e.g. OpenWBEM or OpenPegasus, running on target).
Integrated logging of all events like changes to database entries to a separate database table and integrated event viewer.
Consistency check for the database (compares IPs/MACs/architecture for the equipment from different sources, like the database, DHCP, DNS or so called monfiles and shows wrong entries in red).
Automatic fetching of user data (realname, mail address, telephone etc.) via LDAP.
Change PXE settings for machines and automatically update DHCP configuration files. Supports multiple remote DHCP/ PXE servers (accessed via a small PHP helper script)!
Boot "watchdog" for PXE booting: Disables PXE for a machine after one successful boot (useful for installing over PXE).
Wake on LAN with one click without external helper tools.
Vendor identification by MAC address (vendor data itself not provided due to copyright reasons but you can easily find the database with Google and use the shipped import script to get it into your database).
Automatic generation of rack maps for data centers.
Probing for free hostnames feature: Works by giving a prefix like serverXZY where XZY is replaced with the lowest available number above the set start that is neither in the database nor replies to pings.
Set expiration dates for machines and get notified per mail when they expire.
Ready-To-Run installation script.
Easily themeable (comes with one default theme).
100% free software (GPL) that does not require any non-free tool/lib.

News

05.10.2007:
Release of phpEquiMon 0.1.1. Get it here!

This is a bugfix release that does not contain big new features. The database layout has not changed and you should be done by overwriting the files with the new ones. However, as always, make your backups!
There are still some dirty hacks in phpEquiMon's that I hope to resolve with phpEquiMon 0.1.2/0.2, along with quite some nice new features like a really good integrated documentation, rework of the authentification system (multiple groups per record), PXE improvements and so on. I just need to find some hours of free time to code that all...

This is the complete changelog for 0.1.1:

phpEquiMon 0.1.1:
        * Bugfix: Removed invalid characters from delete link in the list,
        there was still a bracket from the times when the delete link would
        show a JavaScript confirmation box.

        * Bugfix: Fixed cloning feature with an ugly hack (just grep for
        $lastaddid) that needs more care for the next release.

        * Improvement: Added an own dummy exception handler to avoid leaking
        any information to potential attackers if they were able to trigger an
        exception somehow (e.g. by trying to deserialize a malicious string).

        * Improvement: Added helpful comments to config.example.php.

        * Improvement: Several improvements/minor bug fixes in list.php.

        * Bugfix: Fixed another bug with the edit form (in the old code, data
        coming from POST had priority over data from the database which
        rendered "edit next" useless).

        * Improvement: Improved installation script (multiple small tweaks).

        * Improvement: Removed buggy "Submit on Enter" JavaScript. Most
        browser do this by themselves anyway.

        * Feature: Allow filtering by "used by" field of a machine (for
        extended filter mode).

        * Improvement: Room field now features a combo box in the edit form.
        Internally the combo box is prefixed to the location string.

        * Bugfix: Fixed a major bug that prevented users from emptying fields
        that were not empty before (caused by unintuitive isset() operation).

        * Improvement: Removed need to have dbdir ending with a slash. The
        slash is now appended automatically if not present.

        * Bugfix: Do not lowercase vendor names if no vendor logo available.

        * Improvement: Changed font size from 8pt to 9pt.

        * Feature: Provides new mass edit mode for kernel parameter lines.
        Before this, admins where forced to delete and recreate parameter
        lines one by one.

        * Improvement: Replaced ctype_* functions with own wrappers to allow
        phpEquiMon to run on PHP systems without ctype support.

        * Improvement: Slighly changed the footer of the default theme.

        * Improvement: Changed error text for failing cron job in
        DefaultTheme::printFooter() to be more descriptive.

        * Bugfix: Do not try to call filemtime on dbdir/lastcron in
        DefaultTheme::printFooter() if it does not exist.

11.09.2007:
Release of phpEquiMon 0.1. Get it here!

Download

Downloads are available on SourceForge!

Screenshots

Click on the screenshots to enlarge. These screenshots were made with phpEquiMon 0.1. Things might have changed/ improved in the meantime.

FAQ

Is phpEquiMon free?
Under what license is phpEquimon licensed?

phpEquiMon is free software licensed under the GPL.

Anyway: Although I cannot enforce it, I would be very pleased to hear from you if you are using phpEquiMon and get some feedback. I would also like to know if someone makes modifications to the sourcecode- if they are useful, I may like to include them upstream!

Where is the documentation?

I am sorry but at the moment there is no further documentation for phpEquiMon beside this web page and everything that is shipped with phpEquiMon itself. But do not worry, I believe the installation of phpEquiMon with the installation script to be fairly intuitive. Yet, if you encounter problem, feel free to contact me.

The usage of phpEquiMon is quite self-explanatory. On every important page (edit, PXE, system settings etc.) there is additional help directly beside the relevant item. You can configure whether you want this help as tooltips (for low-res users) or text in an own table column.

If you are looking for documentation of the source code to adjust it to your needs: The source code contains explanatory comments that can be parsed by phpDocumentor to generate a beautiful HTML documentation for the source.

How difficult is it to install phpEquiMon?

It is not difficult after all if you have a working webserver (Apache recommended) with PHP extensions and a working database (see next question). PHP should have safemode and magic quoting disabled and cURL and- if desired- SQLite and LDAP support compiled in or included as a module.

For further instructions see INSTALL in the release package.

What database can I use with phpEquiMon?

In theory, you should be able to use all databases supported by PDO (PHP Database Objects) which includes Firebird, MS-SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. Tested by me are SQLite and MySQL.
I had problems with MySQL and a strange PHP PDO Bug though. The PHP Bug is now reported upstream but not yet fixed, so if you encounter problems with MySQL, give SQLite a try (it has flaws, too, but at least it works).

How does phpEquiMon scale?

phpEquiMon is ready to cope with larger environments and handle hundreds of machines. At the moment the largest installation I know of consists of around 500 database records with around 30 users but theoretically there should be few, if any, limits upwards.

However there is one problem: The algorithm used for grouping the virtual machines below the physical host system is not very efficient and scales bad (O(n^2) in case you want to know) and you might need to increase the default PHP memory limit of 8M for it. Redesigning the algorithm seems like work for one or two hours but I'm afraid I did not find the time yet.

phpEquiMon seems to have many features I do not need. Can I disable them?

Many features can be enabled or disabled by hand, like the room map (I understand that the map does not make sense for most of the users that do not own a data center), the "free hostnames" feature or the WBEM functionality.

Other options are automatically hidden by phpEquiMon if the script decides that the option is not useful in your context. For example, you will not see anything related to PXE if you have not entered a PXE server in the config.

I am using SQLite and I cannot login after the installation. Additionally, with all strings from the database, the last character is missing (e.g. the headline says "phpEquiMo" instead of "phpEquiMon").

I am sorry but it seems like you are affected with a known issue in older PHP version with the PDO-SQLite module. This bug is known upstream and fixed in newer versions but it has already caused many headache and affected at least one user of phpEquiMon. I used to have a workaround that appended a space to every string written to the database but I removed it since phpEquiMon now uses several different datatypes and I do not see a point in having around 100 lines of code just to work around an already fixed bug.

I personally have found Gentoo Linux stable, SLES10, Fedora 7 and (K)Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) to be unaffected by the bug, while Fedora 6 and RHEL5 still may have the bug. If possible, upgrading to the latest version will fix the problem. Alternatively, you can choose another database backend like MySQL.

I found a bug.
Please implement feature xyz.

This is not a question, is it? ;-)

Anyway, if you found a bug or have a feature request, feel free to contact me via the SourceForge tracker. Chances are that I might be able to fix the bug quickly or like your feature and start to integrate it into the next phpEquiMon release.

If you need a feature for yourself personally or an corporate enviroment which is not interesting for the rest of the phpEquiMon users, you can still pay me to implement it for you.