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?"

Comments

Why use deployment software at all?

[LaZZaR]

Given the size of your enviroment and the language you used, i'm willing to bet that your employer would not be willing to shell out $$$ for something like SMS. Plus since you are asking this question, you would also lack the expertise. SMS has a fairly steep learning curve. There are open source solutions available, but I have not used any of them, so YMMV.
Why not just use login scripts? Its crude by today's standards, but it gets the job done, and it will cost you nothing.

Re:SMS and Altris 400lb sledge hammer

[dreamer-of-rules]

We have a couple Windows 98 machines for reading mainframe tapes we still get from our clients. The tape software runs in DOS, and simply can not be run in any newer Windows. There is updated tape software, but it's all GUI, less useful, and takes about 10 times longer to do the same thing.

I've spent enough hours trying to get around this.. so now we have these single-purpose systems with severely locked down accounts.

Point is, there may be a good reason they've still got Windows 98 systems in use..

(PCCOE was pretty cool.. I've written a couple site packages for it in a past life.)

ding ding ding

[toadlife]

That's what we've been doing for six years now since moving to a win2k domain. As of now we have around 40 software packages in our "softdeploy" share. Since we have multiple sites, we host the software shares on a DFS root, so we can use on policy for machines in all sites and they get their package from the local site automatically.

I convert non-msi installers into msi format with the freeware program wininstallle 2003 (which is no longer free, but I kept my copy). wininstall tends to create slightly broken packages, so I fix them by running the validation tool in Microsoft's orca utility.

If my boss would spring for a proper msi package creator like adminstudio, I wouldn't have to know so much about msi installers, but that's the way it goes.

Re:Altiris

[Meostro]

Seconded. At a large company I worked for, we used Altiris to do deployments, patches and upgrades. It really beat the previous method, which was to literally take the install CD around to wherever we were working. Altiris lets you do reporting on who has what (including software versions and patch levels), and their package interface is pretty kick-ass. I don't know if the flexibility is available on other packages, but with Altiris you can specify several steps in a deployment, like

• Copy files to client
• Based on OS+SP, copy some additional files
• Run a script that will do some mojo to combine the additional files
• Run an installer
• Based on the installer results, run another package
• Run another script that does reg patches to work around the problems that the package has
• Chain packages together, so you can dump all your hotfixes with one click.
• Better yet, since the job history shows up on the management screen, you can tell which systems have gotten which patches

There are also automatic package deployment processes, so a centralized office can instruct the remote Altiris servers to install patches on all of its clients at X time - that's great for the branches because they don't even have to worry about system-wide patches, they just happen.

In addition to the package deployment system, there are reporting and diagnostic tools too. There is even a "remote desktop" tool, so when an installation goes bad or returns some kind of error, you can remote into the box (and/or lock the user out while you do) and fix whatever is broken while the user is on the phone. A bunch of other tools came with the package too, RapidDeploy(snapshot and deploy app install diffs instead of waiting for the whole install process), profile management (remotely back up/migrate a user or system) and web-based ad-hoc reporting.

Since we were a large company we had a huge Altiris deployment(~80 remote servers for 1000s of clients), and we probably paid $$$$ for it. There are different packages in different sizes available (AFAIK), so you should be able to find a decent match for your company.

(wow, that really sounds like a sales pitch... i don't work for them, i just really liked the product)