Server disk arrays can be quite large especially on file servers with hundreds of user home shares or countless developer or programmer files and directories. There are alternative ways to manage or even police this type of file server other than using SMS and with this in mind you can let SMS exclude these drives when doing a software inventory the same way you did it in SMS 2.0.
You accomplish this by creating a file called SkpSwi.Dat (Skip Software Inventory) that will notify the SMS inventory process not to perform software inventory on a drive that has this file present.
When you enable ‘Software Inventory’ for a site the software inventory agent runs within the first twenty minutes for SMS 2003 as opposed to the first thirty minutes for SMS 2.0 clients after you enable it. This is a global setting that is initiated on a site-by-site basis. This means that when software inventory is enabled the entire site is affected.
By default software inventory is always installed on the site server and the agent for the software inventory is always on your advanced clients so that when you initiate software inventory for your site the agent is already installed and the collection process can begin with no need to first go and install the agent. This is one of the nice features of the SMS advanced client in that all of the agents are installed and sit waiting for them to be enabled on the site server.
Note: On the legacy client it is installed the “Old” way in that it is only installed on these clients when the software inventory agent is enabled on the site server. After the agent is installed the process begins within the first twenty minutes as it does with the advanced client since this is an SMS 2003 default.
Both the advanced and legacy clients follow the same process after the agent is configured on the site server. First they perform an initial or full software inventory or Software Inventory Complete (SIC) and all subsequent inventories called deltas or to be more precise Software Inventory Delta (SID) are collected which are merely changes rather than complete inventories are collected according to the software inventory schedule you have defined.
Tip: Software Inventory Complete (SIC) and Software Inventory Delta (SID) are used with SMS 2.0 as well and have the same functionality.
The easiest way to create the Skpswi.Dat file is to use notepad. First open notepad and then select “Save As” from the File menu and change the “Save As Type” to “All Files” then name the file Skpswi.Dat. After this has been completed locate the file in windows explorer and right mouse click it and from the context menu select “Properties” and change the attributes to Hidden.
After you create the SkpSwi.Dat file copy the file to the root of the drives on the machine that you do not want the software inventory to run on.
For client machines with multiple drives or partitions copy the file to all of the drives you want to exclude from the software inventory process such as disk partitions that have only installation source files for drivers and applications on them. Another example would be if you have a defined collection path of “C:\Program Files” and you do not want the directory folder inventoried place the file in the root of the program files directory.
To resume the software inventory process for the machine or drives simply delete the Skpswi.Dat file and at the next software inventory cycle the inventory scan will execute.
Note: It is important to note here that if your end users are aware of this functionality they can place the file on their systems that will allow them to successfully hide .Mp3 files or Warez applications so they will not be inventoried.
This By Request script was created in response to a users request for a simple way to create a SkpSwi