You just installed a Hot Fix that included a new AClient and you notice that as Auto Update is enabled, it only updates 15 clients at a time. You may find yourself asking, "How can I change the AClient Auto Update value from 15 clients at a time to a different value?"

When a newer version of AClient is installed into the Deployment Share, the managed computers automatically update their copy of AClient to match this newer version. Starting with Deployment Solution 6.5 Hotfix 2, the AClient Auto Update feature only updates 15 computers at a time, to reduce the network traffic used when a new version of AClient is installed.

To view or change the auto update value:
On the computer that Deployment Server is installed on, run Regedit.

Locate and select the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Altiris\Altiris eXpress\Options

Locate and double-click the UpdateAgentsConcurrentlyMax DWORD entry...

Measure twice and cut once. Sometimes not remembering to do that causes trouble, and has sometimes ruined some beautiful wood stock.

Frequently we do something similar in the Task Server environment when we forget to check the collection references that our tasks are assigned to. Like sending a Shutdown, or Restart task to "All Computers".

While this won't be painless to all end users, we can mitigate it and stop it from hitting everyone, using the following procedure:

1. 1. Delete the Task from the Console. This may also involve deleting any referenced items as well.
2. 2. Restarting the Altiris Object Host Service. This will clear the Task Server cache, and allow any deleted jobs to be cleaned and not promulgated to other machines.

It's just that simple. And while...

We all know that there are big Software Delivery packages in the world. We also know that sometimes network infrastructure lets us down. So what do you do when you have this monster of a software delivery package to get to clients, and the network hiccups in the middle. Well ... it depends!

Question

Is there anyway to get Software Delivery to resume a package download from an intermediate state, rather than restarting the package download over completely, when the package delivery mechanism is UNC? What about HTTP?

Answer

If you are using UNC, then the bad news is NO. This is called package checksumming and Checksums are only available via HTTP downloads, not UNC. There are two other things to note here.

1. Once a solid network connection is restored,if your package contains multiple files, the download will resume at the end of the last file successfully delivered, but only via HTTP. This is not supported on UNC...

A very pesky thing in Notification Server is schedule that Purging Maintenance runs on. The default value is that it runs every day at 2:30am. So you have a good sleep going, and all of the sudden, it is rudely interrupted by someone calling you and telling you that your Notification Server is deadlocking all over the place!

Not good!

There are so many other scheduled events running around this time, and of course, Purging is a very database intensive activity, and would well be left to a timeframe when no one else is accessing the system.

Well, while we can't control everything, one frustration has been being able to change the Purging Maintenance schedule. Some have tried to change it via editing the scheduled task, but to no avail.

While a clean, user-interface method is still in the works, a...