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Z.E.N. Clone for Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the does-this-exist? dept.

mwknight asks: "The school district where I work has servers that were patched together with different versions of Novell and NT over the past few years. Management is ready to start over and re-design our network from scratch using Novell 5 servers and Win95/98 clients. I would rather see us go with Linux for the servers, but my biggest opposition is Novell's Z.E.N. Works. Is there a Linux program that behaves similar to ZEN? Mainly something that can remote update software to Win95 boxes? "

4 of 19 comments (clear)

  1. Re:PC-Rdist by 198348726583297634 · · Score: 2
    Oops. Link should be:

    http://www.pyzzo.com/pcrdist

  2. Re:PC-Rdist by 198348726583297634 · · Score: 2
    Ok, here's my history with zen- I used to work for a campus department that maintained the general access labs. We were running NT and used ZEN to distribute applications and manage workstation printing. The problems we encountered were that printers would sometimes distribute and sometimes fail- it seemed arbitrary why they'd do that. Novell tech support couldn't help us at all. Applications, associated with workstation groups, would distribute, but after an arbitrary and changing number of reboots. Again, Novell's response was, "Yeah, it sometimes takes two or three reboots. We don't know why." Lastly, the ZEN client (and this is still an issue- I quit working for the department to go write perl, which helps pay for classes better:) ) makes the zip drives stop working. The machines they're trying to do this on are Gateways, so maybe there's a hardware conflict somewhere... but when I dropped by the office yesterday to work on a paper, they were saying that they'd have to decide between ZEN and the zip drives for some of their labs.

    So that's my experience with flaky ZEN. If you don't have any problems, then it's probably as sweet a package manager as the writing on the box makes it out to be. :)

  3. PC-Rdist by 198348726583297634 · · Score: 3
    PC-Rdist is the way to go. At my college we're sort of using it as a replacement to ZEN. ZEN is notoriously flaky, too.

    PC-Rdist can manage the filesystems of 95/98/NT, as well as the registries. The way it works, you store an image on the server, that contains the filesystem and registry exactly how you want it, and then you have the workstations synchronize to that image. Since it's just file-sharing based, linux+smb will do the job.

    Pyzzo software makes PC-Rdist.

  4. It may be dirty, but it'd work. by kijiki · · Score: 2

    I've never used Z.E.N. but for remotely installing software, how about a special samba share with the install files and a batch file? The workstations could run a program that keeps track of how long the screensaver has been up, and if its been idle more than x amount of time, it checks for new .bat files on the share, and runs them.

    You could make this program as simple or as sophisticated as you please. I would look into programs that keep track of registry changes and installed files. Then you could install the software on a test machine, and prepare something analagous to a .rpm of the program, and put that on the server for distribution.

    Of course, you'd have to make damn sure that the maching serving this special directory isn't compromised, but you should be doing that anyway.

    This was all kind of a spur of the moment type idea, but it seems workable. comments?