Client Management Suite

I am after some advise and some general guidance on how you all manage your agent installation push settings.

The situation i have got is that there are a few hundred clients in our environment that do not have the agent installed for a number of different reasons. I want to be able to try and lower this number for obvious reasons. One of the biggest causes of this problem is when clients machine get rebuilt, the engineer rebuilding the disk does not reinstall the agent. Because altiris thinks the client has got the agent installed (same computer name is used) the agent never gets reinstalled via the policy. 

Im looking for a way find these computers in altiris that used to have the agent installed but now do not? going forward this isnt going to be as much as a problem as i am forcing the build team to but the agent in the gold image but for now i have alot of old machines agentless....

thanks in advance

Tom

If so, you could add a step to add the agent via DS.

You can also use AD / login script.  For instance, you could create a small script that simply checks for the agent, and if not present, runs the installer.  That might clean up several of your "lost" systems.

Just a couple of thoughts.

Thanks Thomas, unfortunetly we are not quite ready for DS and are just ghosting the images at the moment. 

I do like the idea of the group policy method though and might look into that, is their any documentation available on this?

Thanks Again

Tom

but it'll get you going in the right direction:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO2715

I believe the switches and such have not changed.  I'm nearly 100% positive the path has not changed either.

Let us know if that works for you or not.

you can push the agent out via group policy.  if the agent isn't installed and it's joined to the domain, it'll get installed:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO2037&actp=search&viewlocale=en_US&searchid=1294432191152

Okay, few questions on this?

if the agent is installed, does the installation just get dropped there and then?

Also when you upgrade your platform, i assume you just need to change the agent in the installation drop?

Thanks

There's potentially another way.  You could make a policy that targets systems that have not checked in for x number of days.  If a system has not checked in, we could "assume" it doesn't have the agent and attempt to push it.  Just make a target that looks for systems that have not checked in.  If you do a push to these systems and they have the agent (i.e. the system is simply offline due to vacation) nothing happens and you get a 1/day failure rate.  If the system really doesn't have the agent, it'll get it.

Does that make sense?

Yes that makes perfect sense, unfortunetly i havent got a clue how to create this filter i take it? 

Cheers

Have you ever tried to make a filter?  You do so via SQL, but the good news is that for this, the SQL is already there for you.  If you go to Manage | Filters, you can create new filters there.  If you go to Reports | All reports, and then Reports\Discovery and Inventory\Inventory\Windows\Inventory Agent\Inventory Capture.  If you clone and edit this report it shows you the SQL you need.

That report is a bit of overkill, but essentially you're going to select guids from VComputer with a join on vResourceUpdateSummary with something like this:

     HAVING DATEDIFF(day,max(rs.ModifiedDate),getdate()) >=  15

If you talk to anyone that knows SQL, they'll understand.  Your filter will probably look something like this:

select vc.guid

from vcomputer vc

  join vResourceUpdateSummary vrs on vrs.ResourceGuid = vc.guid

HAVING DATEDIFF(day,max(vrs.ModifiedDate),getdate()) >=  15

I haven't tested this, but it's moderately close.  It might need a groupby clause.

Let us know how far you can get with either method, and what you still need.  Before you go making a filter though, see if that report even shows you the systems you need.

OH!  And you can export the list of systems in that report and simply push the agent to them...  That also works.

We used AD in the past but went to building all our images with the client pre-installed.  Symantec has docs for this.  I've now gone to using the method above of systems that checked in.  I also have a rather simple batch file that I run against a csv file of the exported collection.  That is left over from when our Win2k boxes would kill the Altiris service every day. ( They're now retired)  The script will restart the agent if it is installed and write a status  log.

A bit late to the party, but I published a "cleaned up" version of the GPO script we use (assigned as a Machine Startup Script) here.  Hope it helps!  It also tries to reset the Startup setting of the service to Automatic in case some thoughtless user/admin disables it!

Hey thanks for the link, i think the startup script i am looking for will be a simple install the agent without any user intervention like yours and thats it. 

I looked at inventory capture report and unfortunetly the numbers were very low and i dont think it was gathering the information i needed.

I think the safest approach until the agent is installed on the image is to try and create a simple login script to just install the agent if it does not exist.

Thanks

Hi Kyle, looking at your script im thinking this might be a good option to use but i am looking at using this for version 7, will this still work??? im also looking at having this as a silent installation rather than any prompts, is this easily changeable?

Thanks

I haven't tested it with version 7 (we're holding out on upgrading until 7.1...and even then not until 4th Q 2011) but I think it should work OK still.  As for taking out the prompts, sure.  You'd just want to remove those, and assuming that you just have a single NS, set the parameters for the agent install directly.

Thanks Kyle, im going to give this ago!

Cheers