Slashdot Mirror
Solution for Remote Software Deployment on Windows?
DownTownMT asks: "I work as a Windows administrator in a small company with roughly 180 WinXP/2000 and 30 Win98 machines. Our current method for installing Windows patches is WSUS which works great for the non-98 PC's. However, when installing software, such as Adobe, QuickTime and various other tools, our only method is to manually install it on each machine. What are you sysadmins using to deploy software across all of your machines?"
I think the solution you should be looking for is to get rid of the Win98 machines. I'm guessing you have some proprietary/legacy app or systems control running on them but you'll eventually need to get rid of them anyway. Maybe you should work that aspect first?
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Cloning machines has several advantages. With a set of a few images you can ensure that each month you start with clean boxen. People will learn really fast that important stuff should be on the network drive. Usually, the people who really need to customize their system themselves can be trusted with the updates so you just skip the cloning for those. OK, I admit that doesn't do so well in a Windows network. A major annoyance is that it won't update the machine id after the cloning. On GNU/Linux you can fix that kind of stuff in rc.local but I don't know how to do it with Windows. Ghost might be a smart investment.
There are many suggestions here to use SMS or Altris when he has stated that he only has 180 users and still 30 running Windows '98. This is not a company that is will to part with cash for enterprise solutions if they still have Windows '98 lying around. It is also not a company that is overly concerned with security.
I worked in a similar environment in the past and I found that with a properly setup Active Directory and some painfully written batch scripts I was able to get software to install perfectly on every machine in the office. All it takes is a few hours of writing the scripts and testing for each software that you want to install and then you never have to think about that software again. I had a master script that ran when a user logged on that mapped all their printers and file shares, set a random local admin password and then check to see that all software was the latest version.
At my current job which is closer to 50,000 computers we use a much more elligant solution in PCCOE however it is really over kill for what you need.
http://odin749.bloger.com/