Before installing the Columbus Inventory Scanner on a Macintosh operating system, you’ll need to customize the ColumbusInventoryScanner.tar file to ensure the parameters are set for your environment.

If you are deploying the same configuration to multiple devices, it may be beneficial to customize the ColumbusInventoryScanner.tar file beforehand. The following article, Creating a custom *.tar file for Columbus Inventory Scanner deployment to OSX, provides a guide on how to build a custom* .tar file.

The prepared *.tar file will have the following folder structure:

Ensure that the following two files have been checked and modified to correspond with your environment:

• Cis.prv is the hash file the scanner agent uses to talk back to the server. 
• ColumbusInventoryScanner.cfg is a configuration file used to modify the scanner agent's settings. 

Installation

To install the scanner agent onto Mac OS, follow the steps below.

1. Deploy the ColumbusInventoryScanner.tar and the setup.sh file to the /OPT/CIS/ directory on the Macintosh device.
2. Run the included setup.sh script as SUDO using the following command:

sudo sh setup.sh –headless

In this instance, the “--headless” switch prevents local user confirmation to allow for remote deployment. Further details on additional available switches can be found in the setup.sh script and are detailed in this article, Options for the deployment of Columbus Inventory Scanner on OSX.

Once the setup.sh script has been run, the Columbus Inventory Scanner will perform an initial scan using the settings in the config file. Additional files will be downloaded from the Spider Data Collector server during this scan.

The last scan's output results can be found in the Output folder. Once complete, the scanner agent will create a *.tar file and upload it to the Spider Data Collector.

A log file is created during execution. The ColumbusInventoryScanner.log file is stored in the log folder.

Temp files are deleted after each scan. Further information will be appended to the log file accordingly.

The Columbus Inventory Scanner will then run automatically on the Macintosh device according to the schedule in the configuration file.