TatuScan — the inventory that digs until it finds the machine

There is a kind of question that looks simple until you try to answer it honestly:

— How many machines do we have? — Which ones are active? — Is the one in lab 3 the same as asset X in SUAP?

On paper, inventory is a list. In practice, it’s archaeology. A spreadsheet says one thing. The hostname says another. SUAP — Sistema Unificado de Administração Pública (Unified Public Administration System) — has the asset number, the assignment date, the status. The computer, if you ask it properly, tells you operating system, version, hardware age, whether it still breathes on the network. And in the middle of all that sits a gap: the machine’s data and the administrative system’s data almost never meet on their own.

I’ve already tried living in that gap. Excel. Filter. VLOOKUP. “I’ll update it later.” “I think this one is the same.” It works until the day you need a complete map of the fleet — not an educated guess.

That is when TatuScan was born.

The real problem

On campus, a machine isn’t only an asset. It’s a classroom, an office, a lab, printing, authentication, the class that can’t stop because “Windows disappeared.” Coordinating IT without seeing the fleet is administering in the dark: you feel the impact when something breaks, but you don’t see the whole while everything still works.

SUAP holds the institutional side — asset, assignment, history. The computer holds the technical side — what’s installed, what’s online, what aged without asking permission. Apart, the two worlds lie by omission. Together, they tell the full story: which machine actually exists, which is active, which hostname matches which number, what vanished from the network and still shows as if it were on the desk.

I wanted to cross that without ritual. Without exporting, pasting, hoping, and praying.

How the thing works

The idea is distributed and stubborn, in the right way.

A light agent — in Go, for Windows and Linux — runs on the machine and sends the inventory to an API. The API stores everything in SQLite, with stable identification from physical MACs. A separate web panel shows the fleet: systems, versions, hardware age, who’s online, who disappeared.

On the other side come the SUAP data. CSV report, asset number, assignment date. Maintenance scripts cross hostname with asset — IFMT-1234, m1234, the pattern the house already uses — and update activation in the inventory. What the machine reports meets what the administrative system records.

It isn’t magic. It’s a join. But an automatic join beats a spreadsheet by hand every day of the week.

And the name?

I could have called it Inventory Manager Pro Ultimate. Or AssetSync. Or anything that looked like a vendor slide.

I called it TatuScan.

Tatu, the animal — the armadillo. Scan, the action.

Because inventoring a machine fleet is exactly what an armadillo does all day: dig into the ground, burrow where nobody is looking, show up with something that was buried under dust and good intention. The difference is that our armadillo digs through hostname, MAC, asset number, and assignment date — and, with luck, doesn’t get a scare from a dog along the way.

Some people name projects with corporate seriousness. I named mine after a digging animal. If the fleet map got clearer, the humor in the baptism is worth the price.

What changes day to day

Before, answering “how many active machines do we have in this lab?” was hallway talk plus spreadsheet plus emotional memory. After, it becomes a query. The agent accounts for the machine. SUAP anchors the asset. The panel shows the whole. An old duplicate disappears. Activation updates. Inventory stops being a yellowed photograph and becomes a living map.

It doesn’t fix policy. It doesn’t replace old hardware by miracle. But it gets us out of the dark — and dark, in public-sector IT, is where the incident lives before it earns a name.

Open project

TatuScan is open source (GPL-3.0) and lives on GitHub. Agent, API, and panel in the same monorepo; deploy with Docker, Kubernetes, or systemd, if the house asks for it.

If your fleet also lives between spreadsheet and faith, maybe an armadillo can help dig until it finds what matters.