The company I work for, ITS Partners, Thanksgiving week is offering three workshops focusing on Altiris.  These workshops are all offered remote and will include hands on with the Altiris or Service Desk system.  These 3 workshops are $2,000 per person and if you are interested give It’s a call at (877) ALTIRIS.  Slots are limited so reserve yours today.  Workshops available:

• Console Configuration:  This workshop will go over console configurations, security and best practices.  This workshop has been created from feedbck we have received from our customers.  The workshop will be very hands on with you having your own lab environment.  When you are through with the workshop you will be competent in the below areas:
• Go over console security
• How to create console security roles
• How to create organizational views and groups
• How to...

Our IT Security lead asked me today how many people had installed "DropBox" (a file sharing/syncing app).  So I pulled up my Add/Remove programs report, plugged in "%Drop%Box%" as a search term, and promptly was given "No results".  "GREAT!" I thought, "another potential data leakage source not being exploited!"  But then I got to thinking (which I do now and again...).  So I went to www.dropbox.com and installed the app, then checked the Add/Remove Programs applet in Control Panel and saw Dropbox listed there.  Then I reran Software Inventory to update the Add/Remove Programs inventory on my machine.  I was rather surprised to discover that Dropbox did not show up in my inventory, even after purging the local .bak files.  On some deeper digging I checked the registry and found that the Uninstall info for this app actually lives under the...

Hi guys.

We have NS 6.0.6074 (SP 3 + R13) and Assets Management with Barcode Solution

Few months ago we have upgraded our Barcode Solution to the latest version (6.7.9600) and immediately after the upgrade we have stumbled upon the issue:

Barcode Scanner was only downloading active fixed assets. Assets that have been marked other then active were not downloaded.

We spoke to Altiris/Symantec support and they came back with the solution, but unfortunately it was too cumbersome to implement. However, their explanation of the data relation helped me to create very simple solution.

As we wanted to download all fixed assets to the Barcode Scanner, I have created the simple target collection for the Barcode Scanner synchronization.

Create a collection with the SQL query in it

SELECT GUID 

from vFixedAssetResourceStatus

We only need the GUIDs as Notification Server will do the rest for...

I was on-site to a new customer last week and we worked on resolving some problems with their production SMP 7 installation that was consuming an average of 20% of CPU whilst managing a meager  40 machines.

In order to check where the CU cycles were wasted we decided to implement 2 new application pools: one for the InventoryRuleManagement web-service and one for the Altiris/NS/Agent interfaces.

This resolved the issue so this morning, I decided to implement the same solution on my test lab.

And my SMP console has been operating in conditions much worse than what my customer encountered. I started with a single VM (SQL + NS and 4 GiB of RAM) and IIS was constantly taking 100% CPU when I used the console (specially when loading the Patch Management Solution worker view) for a very long time.

Such a long time... that I gave up in the end and built up a 64-bit Windows Server to host the SQL database (with 4 cores and 4GiB of RAM). I migrated the DB...