I've decided to subscribe to this post because I have the same questions about the DAgent and the same feelings about Altiris'/Symantec's commitment to a stable product. They keep dishing out new or upgraded solutions and the 'core' of Altiris (in my opinion and many of my colleagues at other Universities), CMS (DS), goes without serious development in improving stability and functionality. I've been using the DS since 2003 and between random aexengine crashes and unstable client connections, it's enough to make you puke. I have moved more and more of our IT services and production tools to open-source solutions that receive 'constant' development improvements. How much has the NS and DS really changed in the last 5/6 years? Okay. I think that I'm done now... Sorry that I used your post for my soap box ranting.

Guys,



FYI,



I know for a fact altiris is working out the buggy issues with Dagent.



I think they will release the new Dagent in the next couple of weeks. I am trying to get a timeframe from my support contact. Thanks

I agree there are some problems. My experience is that it works flawlessly in standard situations, but there are some really complex problems not entirely related to DS. SP1 made big changes to Vista, and Vista Sysprep is entirely different from XP, as well as faulty.

Anthony,

http://www.airdesk.co.uk

How long do we have to wait for a full featured DAgent? Altiris are you listening? Clients are pissed and Microsoft SCCM is looking sweet at this point.

List the issues. if we bring the issues up I believe Altiris will listen.



Nelo

Here are a few off the top of my head.



Having AClient and Dagent is confusing

No Admin/user password in Dagent

DAgent service is seperate from the GUI

DAgent does not report automation partition is installed

Dagent doesn't offer remote control like AClient.

The remote desktop option connects through name and not IP.

Dagent does not work with teamed NICs

Adding drivers into automation partitions, sysprep, and OS could be alot easier

Does not scale well with multiple sites, especially if you don't have NS.

AD console security does not work with nested groups

Boots to automation partition on reboot with no job scheduled.

Deployment console is not 100% cluster friendly

LMHOST doesn't seem to work in the GUI

Deployment solution server cannot be installed on 64 bit

Deployment solution server cannot be installed on 2008

Deployment console in remote sites is slow is connecting back to main site.

Nesting jobs could be alot easier.

Having AClient and Dagent is confusing. Not Really One is for XP and the other for Vista.

No Admin/user password in Dagent. Not sure what you mean here.

DAgent service is seperate from the GUI. Ah, would this be a security issue? or running on level 0?

Dagent does not work with teamed NICs. yeah this is broken in HP RDP



The rest I dont know.



nelo

Hello,



I'm sorry but Dagent vs Aclient is confusing.

I use NS to deploy Altiris agents, and it is not easy to setup.

It looks like by default Dagent is for NS package servers and Aclient for the others.



So by default NS tries to install Aclient even on Vista machines. And it reports that installation was fine.



In NS there's no way to distinguish Aclient vs Dagent during auto installation, so I need to take in account OU or other things to be sure that aclient will be pushed to XP and Dagent to Vista.



In addition, do they plan to merge NS and DS ? More easy integration will be better for us (NS package server replications,...)



Concerning the remote control, I hope to see PC anywhere integration soon...

-Having AClient and Dagent is confusing

In 6.9 SP1, there still are both agents, but the default agent is DAgent - AClient is being phased out

-No Admin/user password in Dagent

Don't know

-DAgent service is seperate from the GUI

This is by design, and is for security reasons

-DAgent does not report automation partition is installed

I think this works in 6.9 SP1

-Dagent doesn't offer remote control like AClient.

Available in 6.9 SP1, but due to security concerns, some functionality is limited

-The remote desktop option connects through name and not IP.

This is Windows Remote Desktop, right, so it is not a DAgent issue?

-Dagent does not work with teamed NICs

I think this works in 6.9 SP1



I thought that we were discussing the DAgent, and these are not agent issues, but DS issues...

-Adding drivers into automation partitions, sysprep, and OS could be alot easier

-Does not scale well with multiple sites, especially if you don't have NS.

-AD console security does not work with nested groups

-Boots to automation partition on reboot with no job scheduled.

-Deployment console is not 100% cluster friendly

-LMHOST doesn't seem to work in the GUI

-Deployment solution server cannot be installed on 64 bit

-Deployment solution server cannot be installed on 2008

-Deployment console in remote sites is slow is connecting back to main site.

-Nesting jobs could be alot easier.

Some good news is a lot of these issues have been addressed in 6.9 SP1.



https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=42696&p=1

quote:
-The remote desktop option connects through name and not IP.

This is Windows Remote Desktop, right, so it is not a DAgent issue?

No, when you call RD, you should use the full qualified name instead of the machine name.

We have a multi-site network, and when we try to connect to an other network, we need to type manually the target machine

Dagent will not stay running
it ends with this message: Connection Closed,Session Terminated
I have uninstalled, cleaned the registry of any mention of altiris or dagent and reinstalled.

Dagent and Altiris DS in general has been very frustrating and unstable.
We are using 6.9 SP1
We have 1200 plus boxes running off a DS console

Machine OS is Vista Enterprise
I have a machine that will not allow the dagent to stay running for more than 30 seconds.
This was going to be an important prototype for 120 machines.

It used to be that aclient.cfg lived on the root of C:\
In the senario when the Dagent stopped working we deleted c:\aclinet.cfg and ran c:\program files\altiris\dagent\dagentconfig.exe set it to our server ip port 402 and we were good.

message bootstrap.cpp:904 - Error reading input file

Anyone know what to do with this?