Symantec Management Platform (Notification Server)

Hello,

We have installed the 7.1 SP2 agent on a few of our machines without using the console, just a manual install from the desktop.  Some of the machines do not seem to communicate with the NS when the agent is installed. 

Does the Altiris Service Account have to have the ability to open the admin share to a machine?  By that I mean, connecting \\machinename\C$.

When we give this account permission to connect to the admin share, everything appears to start working.  Is that a correct assumption?  Or is there some other configurations on a client machine that have to be configured in order for the agent to communicate with NS?

Thank you.

The Altiris Service account used on the Notification Server only needs access to the Admin$ share to push the Symantec Management (Altiris) Agent. Once the Agent is correctly installed on the target computer (and running as the local System account) it does all the work. So you could manually install the Agent on a workgroup PC and it should work, the only requirement is for HTTP connection. (Further functionality like tickle and Tasks will need more ports.)

I really appreciate the response.

Our situation is this:

We have some machines that have an Altiris agent installed with the Inventory plug-in.  At some point, the Inventory Task stopped reporting.  We noticed that we could not manually connect to the admin share of these machines using the Altiris Service account.  We concluded this was the problem.   However, just today, we discovered three machines that would not allow the Altiris Service account to connect to the admin share, but Inventory is still reporting on schedule.  This blew our conclusion out of the water.  The ability of the Altiris Service account to connect to the admin share has nothing to do with it.

Assuming the agent has a healthy install, is there something else we should be looking at on our Windows machine configurations?

Use the Remote Altiris Agent Diagnostics (RAAD) tool to look at good and bad agents, there's an Inventory tab that will tell you if it's being collected:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO21449

You could also try creating Managed Delivery Policies to collect inventories, there's a KB article on that but I can't find it. Edit: Found it all, there's a Tech article that now contains a suggestion:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH187623

And there's a blog posting:

http://www.symantec.com/connect/node/2431411

There's a Hotfix 1 for 7.1 SP2 MP 1.1 that contains a revised Inventory agent:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO81832