From bwilder@cs.washington.edu Mon Nov 10 09:07:56 1997 Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 09:01:21 -0800 (PST) From: Brady Wildermuth To: Martin Dickey Subject: Project Proposal Project Proposal: Asset Tracking System for Clark Elementary School -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Clark Elementary School, part of the Issaquah School District, has a need for a hardware tracking database. The entire School District is on a large WAN with individual LANs for each school. Every classroom currently has at least two networked computers in it and will have more in the future. In addition, they have a lab with about 20 machines in it. Most of the current tracking for this hardware and its software is done by hand or in Excel spreadsheets. A database of this information would make the tracking and assigning of this hardware far more efficient than the current system. The most important function of the database would be to track and assign TCP/IP address as they are still statically assigned at this time. Someday they hope to get a DHCP server working, but until that time, tracking IP addresses by hand is a pain. The database could also hold much more information. For example, the amount of RAM and disk space a machine has, what teacher the computer belongs to, what room the computer is located in, the School District's asset number, etc I have not yet decided what DBMS to use - most likely either SQL Server or Access. A web cgi interface, or at least a partial interface would probably be the ideal front end (at least for the most common actions like finding a free TCP/IP address). A more traditional interface might be needed for maintaining everything in the database, or it might not if we get everything into cgi's. Interfacing with a cgi script may be the deciding factor for which DBMS we use. I've seen a cgi script written against a SQL server; if the same thing cannot be done for Access then we'll have to go with SQL Server as our DBMS. I foresee the web interface as having separate pages for each "function" that might be done in the database. Such as changing what room a teacher is in, or how much RAM a machine has. There would be drop down list boxes that will get populated with all of the information in the database for that field and then either another drop down or an edit field for the new value. For example, if I wanted to change how much RAM a computer has I might pull down a drop down list for all of the computer asset numbers that belong to a particular teacher, and select the machine in question's asset number. Then in an edit field I'd type in 32 for the new amount of RAM it has. I'd then hit a submit button and the database would be updated.