E-Z Audit 

E-Z Audit 4.2 is a system-auditing tool that gives detailed reports about a system’s hardware and software. It can be a useful tool for tracking all PC inventory on your network, as it provides this information on one central console. It gathers extensive information about every PC, which includes everything from the speed and type of CPU in it to all the software installed on it.

You can know how much RAM is in it, what network card it has with its connect speed, MAC address and TCP/IP information. You can also find out how many local, removable and network drives are there on the system, what printers are connected, both networked and local, and much more. On the software front, it tells you which OS is running and with which service packs, if any. When we checked it, it managed to detect Win NT, 2000 server, and even XP. Apart from this, it can tell what programs are installed on a system, their names, exe files and dll versions. 

Setting up the software is a little tricky, and you need to refer to the manual. You have to create a network share named “audit” with a sub-directory named “reports” so that all PCs on the network can access it. You then have to install an

EZ-audit viewer console on any machine that will be used to view the scanned reports. This console also lets you create a scanner batch file and specify a location where the scan results should be kept. You’ll then need to copy this batch file to the network share and run it on every PC you want to audit. You’ll also have to install a scan engine on the same shared folder from a zip file called “net-cd.exe” found on the machine you installed the console viewer. When you run the batch file on a PC, it takes about a minute to scan a system, and create the result file on the common network share. The good thing here is that you don’t need to install anything on the machines you’re auditing. The utility runs directly off the network drive and scans every system. The bad thing that follows from this is that you have to manually run it on every machine, unless you put it in the login script for every machine. 

The console viewer picks up the report from the shared directory and lets you view the inventory in several ways. You can view each PC’s inventory separately, or view all machines by their hardware configuration. It also lets you search all machines for a specific software. This is really useful in finding out at one go which machines are running a specific software, good for tracking unwanted or pirated software. Finally, you can export the reports in HTML or Excel formats. A trial version is available for download from
www.ezaudit.net.

The Bottom Line: A very useful utility for network administrators. What’s even better is the attractive price tag. 

Sanjay Majumder at PCQ Labs