IT Management Suite

Right now we are about to migrate thousands of Altiris 6x package servers in a large retail environment over to ITMS site servers.  In the Altiris 6x infrastructure, the codebase is generated via HTTP and UNC using short name resolution which works fine in our retail environment in the same broadcast domain.

The issue we are running into with ITMS site servers is that the SWDpackagecodebase table now hands out the FQDN of the site server and to each client, therefore forcing us to insert thousands of "A" records in our primary DNS zone which is not ideal.

Is there a way to force to manipulate on the client end the swdpackagecodebase to append a connection specific suffix for a sub zone instead of handing out only the primary DNS suffix for each site server?  For instance, instead of hostname.acme.com to view the connection specific suffix\dynamic dns sub zone as hostname.subzone.acme.com.

Thoughts?

There are no settigns on the client for changing the codebase given from the server (but there is the client network settings that can append DNS suffixes in order?). I expect if you try to change it via scripting on the  client it just wont stick and will revert often.

You might wish to examine the codebases in the database and try to change those, but the same thing will occur, they will revert, so not sure how to do this within CMS, although have never faced this problem yet, it's typically not somethign Altiris is designed to do, to work around a DNS issue, but an idea posted might help you.

Perhaps a sheduled client task script that takes the codebase from the policy.xml, converts it as you wish and then appends to the hosts file? I could probably manage that with autoit unless the change to the suffix was dynamic since i am not au fait with where the source for that info will be found from the client side. Logon script may also help.