The FusionInventory network inventory task, which should be more precisely described as remote inventory through SNMP, has always been plagued by a critical limitation: SNMP models. Such a model enumerates mappings between SNMP OIDs and inventory variables, such as ‘the location is available at OID .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1.6.0’, and was mandatory because there was no intelligence in the agent itself, making it unable to perform anything without this information. In order to inventory any kind of device, the relevant model had to be defined first and assigned to this device second, which was a problem in itself, as device identification was based on exact matching of SNMP SysDescr string only… (See Network discoveryimprovements for details).
Since the agent 2.3.4 release, we introduced simple but radical changes, using default hardcoded OIDs for most variables, and minimum intelligence for determining what to extract from the context. The agent is now able to retrieve almost every interesting information from any device out of the box, which is a huge improvement of the situation. Some specific pieces of information are still problematic:
Network inventory without model was sofar only possible from command-line, through fusioninventory-netinventory executable, as the GLPI FusionInventory plugin didn’t allowed to run an inventory task for devices without model. This constraint has been relaxed with 0.84+2.1 release, and is now only enforced for agent whose version is less than 2.3.4.