[THIN] Re: OT: Altiris or others for client management

  • From: Jim Kenzig <jimkenz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 14:49:51 -0500

We use Altiris to image, deploy and manage all of our PC's and thin clients
(mostly NetX www.netxinc.com which comes with altiris)  We currently have
900 units installed running it. The client is easily pushed out to any PC on
your network. Once installed you can see all information about the client
including network settings, installed devices, software and services and
enter in inventory information about the client. You are able to shadow and
remotely control the client, send files and messages very similar to PC
anywhere.  Altiris has something called Rapid Install Packager(Rip) that
allows you to create easy installations of any software package or patch.
Basically you start RIP, do a baseline of the PC to read all the settings,
install the new software and then it does a compare of changes with the
baseline and creates a single executable file(like an msi) This file than
can be scheduled or pushed out to any PC that has the client on it. You
could literally install MS Office or any other program on a group of PC's
without every leaving your office.
Compaq and some other vendors give you a one time imaging client license so
that you can image your PC with altiris also.
The deployment server is a bit to set up but fairly straight forward.
Altiris uses PXE to image the clients along with DHCP server so you'll need
to install DHCP server on the system.

We have been using Altiris to clone, ghost, image or whatever you want to
call it, our PC's for 6 years now. Basically you set up a dos boot disk that
the altiris package will create for you that has the network card and
network settings and that maps to your drive with your images and altiris.
We use their dos utility ibmaster instead of the console to do imaging
because it is faster and just run it from the mapped drive as part of the
logon batch file.  With this utility you can upload and download and even
multicast an image to several PC's at once.  It is a heck of a lot easier to
figure out and run than ghost and it works great.

If you use DHCP throughout your network it makes things even easier because
you can set up system events and reimage PC's and clients as they are turned
on.  You can also get Pocket PC (windows CE) and Server licences for it so
that you can use it to remotely manage ALL of your servers.  Since we got
Altiris, I now rarely have to set foot in the computer room because I can
start a remote control session right over to the console of any of my
servers from my desk. Talk about awesome.
Some will say...yeah but you could do the same thing with a TS session, but
that isn't the case cause you are not actually on the console, you are
within a session running on the machine and you won't see console error
messages.

The Altiris Management console itself can be easily pushed out and installed
to any PC you want also via the setup/add components portion of the program,
which makes it nice to give to your admins and help desk people.

It seems like every other day we think of a new way to use it and find
another benefit that it gives us.

The best advice I can give you is to try a demo of it.  The newer version
also allows for Web based administration which requires IIS of course.

Regards,
Jim Kenzig
http://thethin.net


-----Original Message-----
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Nail, Larry
Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 2:19 PM
To: Thin (thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Subject: [THIN] OT: Altiris or others for client management



Folks,

I'm going to go off on a limb and investigate other Client Management
Soltuions.  I've frequently seen people mention Altiris here, so I figured
I'd ask and see what your experiences are.  I'm currently using SMS, but
it's got some limitations that I'm pretty much fed up with like:

- Software Inventory (SI) Accuracy - The software inventory process is
pretty heavy and due to the central database inputs, it freqently needs
intervention.  We use SI to do virus signature checking, executable
reporting, etc... the problem is that we don't get anything close to
realtime reporting.  That wish may just be a pipe dream tho.

- SMS Client - it breaks alot & it's difficult to remove completely (ie
we're doing custom scripts)
I could go on, but I don't want to bore you.

Anyway, if you could to tell me about your experiences with Altiris, I'd
appreciate it.  I'm looking to do Software distribution, Asset Management
(including hardware & software inventory), and Configruation Management.

If someone is using something other than Altiris like Configuresoft, I'd
like to hear about that too.

Thanks a bunch,
Larry
______________________________________
Lawrence D. Nail
Member, Group Technical Staff
Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer for Windows (r) 2000
Strategy Team
Helpdesk and Desktop Services
Texas Instruments Incorporated
 Email:  lnail@xxxxxx
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