Manually Scanning Individual Disk

To discover software that is installed on shared disks in your infrastructure, run the software scan with the Scan remote shared disks option enabled.

Before you begin

  • This method of scanning is advised for environments in which a single shared disk is mounted on one or only few computers. For information, see: Discovering software on shared disks.
  • If more computers are configured to scan a shared disk, performance of the disk might decrease drastically and the scanning might take a long time. It is recommended to schedule the clients to scan the shared disk at different times, for example to spread the scanning across many days of the week.
  • If the shared disks to be scanned are large, scan timeout problems might occur.

    The difference is that automatic mode scans all shared disks that exist in your environment. If you want to scan only selected shared disks, use manual scanning. For more information, see: Discovering software on shared disks. If you already set up manual scanning (this method), you can switch to automatic scanning. For more information, see: Switching to automatic scanning of shared disks.

Procedure

  1. Discover shared disks that exist in your infrastructure.
  2. Exclude unsupported file systems from scanning.
    1. In the navigation tree, click Analyses.
    2. Click Shared Disk Information, and open the Results tab to recognize file systems that must be excluded from scanning.
    3. In the navigation tree, click Fixlets and Tasks and select Add Excluded Directories. Specify directories or mount points of unsupported file systems, and click Take Action. For more information, see: Adding excluded directories.
      Tip: A mount point is a directory that is at the top of the file system hierarchy. You can verify whether a directory is a mount point by checking the output of the mount or mountpoint commands.
    4. Select computers on which you want to exclude the unsupported file systems and click OK.
  3. Stop the current software scans.
    1. In the navigation tree, click Actions.
    2. In the upper right pane, select the Initiate Software Scan action.
    3. In the lower pane, click Stop.
  4. Initiate software scans with the option to scan remote shared disks selected. To effectively setup the scan you can create a manual group for computers and use this option.
    Important: Automounted remote disks will be scanned only if they are mounted during the scan.

Results

Information about shared disks and the installed software is available on the following reports:
  • Computers report (when you access it from the widget on the homepage) contains information about the type of file system, shared disk IP address, and mount point
  • Scanned File Data report contains information about the file path
  • Software Classification report contains information about the installation path

What to do next

9.2.6 Information about scanned files and directories in your file system is stored in the scanner cache folder. By knowing the hierarchy of files, the scanner can locate them quicker, which results in shorter scans. The amount of disk space that is needed for the cache depends on the number of files that are being scanned. If the current location of the cache folder cannot ensure sufficient disk space, you can change the location of the cache folder or optimize the cache. For more information, see: Optimizing scanner cache configuration.