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.....

The requirement is to be able to boot from a USB device and to be instantly thrown into an offline imaging menu where they can either upload an image to the USB device, or download an image from the device to the computer. Mostly there, but as usual (for me) the last 10% of the project takes up the bulk of the time....

Using whiptail to drive the menu, and lots of bash scripting goodness to bring it all together.

Very challenging piece finished today -the disk info screen. Now have the systems disks indexed nicely with partition ennumeration. The images on the source drive listed with sizes.

Some handy links...

A tip which...

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.

So.. for this round of beta testing I decided to bite the bullet and get a OCZ RevoDrive for my beta testing virtual machines. The Revodrive 3 240GB capacity is more than enough to house my beta SMP server, domain controller, a site server,  some dhcp routers and a couple of client VMs.

I am not disappointed. HDTune registers drive transfer rates of over 400MB/s and 0.1ms access times. Even within a VMWare workstation VM, the times are sweet. When benchmarking within a VM, the most notable change is in the access time. Initial tests show this ballooning to over 0.7ms, but in context this is still 20-30 times faster than my harddisk!

My Windows 2008 R2 server VM...

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,

1. The AClient process is still memory resident
2. netstat shows TCP 402 still ESTABLISHED
3. service does not respond to stop requests
4. Log file is not written to

So, the AClient is pretty much dead. The process needs to be killed, and the service started.

This is a pain though, as when deploying large numbers of machines the unresponsive agent eats into our success statistics and causes frustration. So... how to see if the AClient is running?

Been puzzling this over last night, and came up with the following script with the ever helpful Darren...

 '####################################################
'# VBScript to get some AClient process and log
'# data so that we can see if...

When any new driver/s are added to Deploy Anywhere/Preboot Driver Database Manager; being these special packages with dynamic data, it takes 8-10 hours to replicate these to existing Site Server under corresponding folder if if added single driver.

This creates following issues:

1. During DA process of Imaging or SOI; user will not get correct drivers added to its computer working under a particular Site Server
2. During Preboot creation; user will not find the appropriate drivers inside image which are getting created at Site Server before driver replication

So once the drives are added at NS; following is the method to achieve such driver replication immediately/on demand:

Go to SM Console > Settings > All Settings > Deployment and Migration > Drivers > [{Click on the package type for which drivers are added} (Say Drivers) > on Package Tab {Click Update Distribution Points} [Below is the image to present the same]...