A few years ago I had a baby lab set up at home running ESXi (when it was still free) and a few Linux virtual machines.
It enabled me to stay up to date with a number of ServiceNow platform capabilities. Thinks like ITOM Vis, or Health. ACCV, etc.
As my role moved more and more into a senior advisory one, and even further away from even occasional hands on keyboard type work, I stopped needing it as much and my faithful lab PC started to feel neglected and resent me. I know this, because it checked out and spectacularly terminated itself.
In the years since that, I have occasionally run into challenges where having a lab PC back would have helped me. I couldn’t justify the cost though. Not until my daughters got into Minecraft that is, and not wanting them to be online fully just yet, I realised I needed a Minecraft server on my LAN. I discovered that the world had moved on and super low power small form factor devices were now available. I also discovered new virtualisation software, which for my level of usage was free.
So a week or so later, my daughters have their minecraft LAN server, and I have a lab server host again! This is a good thing, because I do want to experiment a little with some of the ITOM capabilities that have landed in the last couple of releases. Before I do that though, I wonder how easy is it these days to get a basic discovery setup running with an instance? Lets find out.
Step 1: Create a Linux VM to use as a host for a MID. Once upon a time I used to be a Linux Sysadmin, so lets see how easy I still find it to do all this on the command line. The instance has a reference to the docs:-
I create a MID user, following the instructions - it's easy to miss stuff like assigning it the right roles, so it's always a good idea to be careful and avoid some annoying debugging later down the line.
Also in the instance, the downloads links.
I'm running Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. So I've downloaded the deb file to my mac the copied it via scp/ssh to my new VM and have installed it with dpkg.
I now create a mid server user (non root account) on my ubuntu server (adduser miduser1), and run the ./installer.sh from the MID folder.
I can then see it in the MID Server list in the instance, and I validate it, allowing all capabilities.
After a few minutes, I still saw "validating". And now because I've watched the IT Crowd, I know the answer here. Switch the server off and back on again…. Et voila 🙂
I quickly create a discovery scan for my LAN, to run weekly on Monday - and add a discovery IP Range in the related list for the schedule covering my whole LAN.
I'm not waiting until Monday though. So I kick the schedule off now using the related link "Discover now".
Bingo. That's less than an hour. Discovery up and running and scanning my network. Now OK, I've supplied no credentials, haven't configured credential-less, etc, so most of the stuff on the network will not classify, but still - 30 minutes start to finish including the time required to set up the ubuntu host.
