autodesk inventory advisor Archives

I had some problems with the Autodesk Inventory Advisor. Basically, I couldn’t get it to access all of the PCs in my domain network.

Evidently, the main issue was DCOM / WMI access. I tried using Group Policy on the server and I even installed a free Group Policy update utility to push the update through to Client PCs. However, the server side GP method wasn’t really working for me.

The key thing that seemed to work was using this command on each PC individually:
netsh firewall set service type = remoteadmin mode = enable
(from Enable or Disable the Remote Administration Firewall Rule: Windows Firewall (WF) and Help: Enable or disable the remote administration exception: Windows Firewall (WF) )

In Windows 7, the above command will probably still work, but the proper one is:
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group=”Windows Remote Management” new enable=yes
here
and
Windows 7 Remote Administration Firewall group

After the above command was run on a PC, the Inventory Advisor could access it.

It is a pretty cool utility, because you can access hardware information from all PCs in the network (as well as the Autodesk related info).

Download the Autodesk Inventory Advisor.

For detailed instructions, refer to the Autodesk Inventory Advisor tool guide.

Autodesk Inventory Advisor Tool Guide (pdf – 1369Kb)