ianatkin's blog

This morning my task was to do a mass-update of embedded scripts on our master deployment server. The reason is I needed to upgrade to the latest version.

There are two ways of doing this,

I attended a SQL Server user group just before christmas and I found it pretty illuminating. Well worth the trip out. Altiris administrators have to wear many hats, and SQL Server knowledge is more than useful -it's critical for a smooth running Altiris setup.

Been working over the last few days trying to finish up a project for a standalone Altiris imaging wrapper for Linux. The idea is to re-create the basic Windows RDeploy interface in Linux. But with less features... thankfully.....

Beta testing on the Symantec Management Platform is a pain. The hardware prerequisite for a responsive console throws the traditional workstation beta testing VMs out into the cold. Whilst they work, it's pretty frustrating beta testing when you're waiting ages for console refreshes.

When imaging machines over and over in testing, we occasionally find that after a reboot (initiated by an agent power control task) that the AClient just stops responding. We are using here DS6.9SP4.  We see,

A couple of weeks ago, we got in a nice new Dell Latitude 6220 to ratify with Altiris. It's a nice little laptop -quite nippy on the  SSD front and overall  performs nicely in our benchmark tests.

In preparation for our DS6.x to 7.x upgrade path, I'm looking at how to document DS6.x jobs. Ideally, I'd like to be able to point a SQL Script at a DS6.x Job and have the entire job nicely documented as an HTML report.

Looking at our job trees, I need to document first and foremost,

Been busy tidying up long standing tasks over the last couple of days,

Been thinking a little bit on how I can throw pretty pictures into Altiris HTML reports.

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/473810-send-an-html-email-with-embedded-image-and-plain-t/

Milestone reached today!!

I've managed today to plug a few solid hours in upgrading the ImageInvoker engine, and have tested successfully the protocol for a client AD authenticating at the engine and receiving it's authorised job list.