So here's the story, at the helpdesk, for us to remote desktop a workstation, we have to tell the users every time to go to the apple, then syspref, then network, etc etc.. is there ANY application out there that just has the internal IP address sitting on the menu bar? keeping in mind it can't be a widget either as there's a shitheap of 10.3 machines too.

i submit that istat menus can do this...

Cheers, a bit too extreme for the end user.. we just want them to just read to us the ip address with less than 4-5 steps if possible.

I have seen an app a couple of years ago that just had the ip address on the menu bar without extensive menus/whatnot.. now i can't find it (yeah google is most days, my friend, but not today).

This looks like it might be able to help

most foolproof option, get a brother p-touch and label each machine with their IP and S/N, that is assuming you're supporting clients in your own company and that you're using a DHCP server with static mapped addresses.

Or maybe here: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16607

a) Look at the mail headers from the user.

b) write a script that periodically calls a web page on a web server and that page is a php script that writes the IP addresses into a database.

c) look at the dhcp lease file on your DHCP server

d) There is probably some hackery to make the mac register it's name in the DNS server so you can use name-of-machine.your.dns.domain or just use machine-name.local. Naming machines after the user or having a registry of names -> users doesn't suck.

Or this... Tiny... Shows internal and external IP's...
http://loopware.com/software/

Why not name all the computers on the network in Sharing, then use ARD? A quick network scan will show up everyone's computer with names, so you don't have to ask.

the computer names are set to the asset numbers, not my point of call to suggest stuff to management :P

Is there some terminal command (ifconfig -something) that will show the eth0 IP?

at a company i worked for (all windows users..), i made a .bat file which would do an ipconfig /all then write it to a network share \\servers\support\computers\<machine>.txt , and they would just read us their computer name (which was labeled on the machine), you could easily do this with something in the StartupItems list, or have it run via the terminal in crontab (ifconfig -a > share)

Is there an asset label used in your company? We found this was actually a fairly simple method 'look for the green sticker etc ...'

with iClock you can set it so all you need to do is hold the cursor over it on the menu bar (without clicking on it) and it shows you the IP address (both internal and external). I know it does this because I just looked and it is how I keep track of my partner's IP address when occasionally sending a file from my laptop to hers ........... too lazy to get out of my chair with the file on a thumb drive.

You could name the hard disks after the users instead. There's a column in ARD for startup disk from memory.

Otherwise, make a list of asset numbers and users and manually edit the names in ARD, or better still, use the internal DNS to do name them, if you're allowed to change it.