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 *********************************************** This Weeks Sponsor OneApp Total Control Control, Secure and Audit your Thin Client Systems http://www.oneapp.co.uk *********************************************** For Archives, to Unsubscribe, Subscribe or set Digest or Vacation mode use the below link. http://thethin.net/citrixlist.cfm *********************************************** This Weeks Sponsor OneApp Total Control Control, Secure and Audit your Thin Client Systems http://www.oneapp.co.uk *********************************************** For Archives, to Unsubscribe, Subscribe or set Digest or Vacation mode use the below link. http://thethin.net/citrixlist.cfm