Summary

This article discuss why network filesystems may be excluded from inventory on UNIX-like operating systems, and how can they be included.

Question

Why are network drives excluded from inventory even when I haven't set the ExcludeDirectory preference, for example as shown in the following sample logging:

File tracking looking for files in directories '/w001/nfs'
...
File tracking of files on mount point '/w001/nfs/domains' of type 'nfs' will be excluded

I added an IncludeDirectory=/w001/nfs preference setting, and it includes and then excludes it, why is this?

Answer

The exclude comes from it being a network file system.  The inventory gathering process will start its filesystem scan in the /w001/nfs directory, but it will not recurse into the sub-directory /w001/nfs/domains. This is because the default configuration is to not scan network-based filesystems.

This behavior is controlled using the following preferences:

IncludeNetworkDrives (default: false)
IncludeFileSystemType (default: "ufs,zfs,lofs")
ExcludeFileSystemType (default: "")

All of this is done to prevent the inventory gathering process from operating over a network connection. This behavior can be overridden by altering the above preferences. For example:

IncludeNetworkDrives=true
IncludeFileSystemType="nfs,ufs,zfs,lofs"

For example, edit /var/opt/managesoft/etc/config.ini file under the section 

[ManageSoft\Tracker\CurrentVersion]
IncludeNetworkDrives=true

This setting is affected by others like IncludeDirectory which can alter the directory to be scanned in conjunction with this setting.  In order for a scan against a network drive to occur, IncludeNetworkDrives has to be set to true even if IncludeDirectory points to such a location.

For more on these preferences information, see the Preferences section in the Gathering FlexNet Inventory guide.