MDS and Inventory Scout

Inventory Scout is a standard AIX utility that surveys AIX partitions and workstations for hardware and firmware information. This information is written to a file which serves as input to the Microcode Discovery Service. The file is called a survey file, or sometimes a *.mup file. Inventory Scout is installed by default on all AIX 5 and later systems.

The Microcode Discovery Service generates reports from Inventory Scout survey files. These reports detail installed levels of microcode and whether they are at the latest level.

Inventory Scout can be run by one of the MDS tools, or by users from the AIX command line or a script. Use the following section to help determine which way of running MDS is most appropriate for your environment.

Running Inventory Scout

Both MDS and Inventory Scout require an up-to-date microcode catalog. This catalog contains information on all available microcode packages. The microcode catalog on the surveyed AIX system is updated each time Inventory Scout is run via either of the following methods:

In addition to the above methods you may run Inventory Scout by itself, either manually or programmatically. If so you are responsible for downloading the latest microcode catalog onto each AIX partition to be surveyed. The most current microcode catalog can be found here. Please consult the Inventory Scout command reference for more information.

The resulting survey files may be concatenated into a single file for uploading to the MDS web site for analysis. Note that a blank line should be inserted between each survey file in the final concatenated file.

Inventory Scout V1 vs. V2

The design changes in Inventory Scout version 2 (V2) to facilitate microcode management may affect some customers who have developed operational techniques based on the older version. Some of these techniques will continue to work as is, while others require some modification.

  • The V2 output survey file (mup file) has a different format than Inventory Scout V1. Each system and device in the file is represented by a single space-separated stanza of keyword/value pairs.
  • The microcode catalog that ships with Inventory Scout V2 is empty. Using the default, unpopulated catalog will result in an unusable survey file. To get a populated catalog, you must either run Inventory Scout with one of the tools listed in the section above, or download and install it manually.
  • Inventory Scout V2 cannot concatenate survey files, however you can use MDS to combine information from many heterogenous systems (Inventory Scout V1 and/or V2) into one report. The MDS web site will accept an updoad file created by concatenating several Inventory Scout (V1 and/or V2) mup files using the AIX cat command.
    Note: To guard against a problem with concatenating Inventory Scout V1.x mup files (which have no terminating new-line character) a blank line should be inserted between mup files.
    The invscout -v option is still retained in V2 for backward compatibility, but it operates only on Inventory Scout V1 files.