Deployment Solution

We all know what Altiris PC Transplant is used for, to migrate user data and settings (User Profile) from a source computer (Old) to the Destination computer (New). But how many of us actually know about all the features and utilities that come along with the Altiris PC Transplant package?

My guess is not many as I could not find any decent posts on the internet about these utilities and explaining what they do in detail. So I have decided to go into more detail on these fairly unknown Altiris PC Transplant Utilities.

Profile Merger:

You might have worked in an industrial environment or factory where there are multiple production machines running 24/7 keeping the company's production process up and running. On these production workstations you might have 10 or more profiles of all the different shift workers on this workstation. Many files related to the work they completed on that shift might be scattered all over the workstation and not easy to find or you do not have access to urgent production data from the previous shift. All that said, there is a solution for this problem, Altiris PC Transplant Utility called, Profile Merger.

Profile Merger lets you copy all the data in existing profiles into a single profile on the same computer. After merging all profiles into one profile, you can delete the other profiles. This tool removes the profiles of inactive users without losing the data stored in their profiles.

How do you access this Utility you might ask?

Well it is very simple, you can access this utility by navigating to the eXpress share on your Altiris Deployment Server: \\deploymentservername\express\pct\profilemerger.exe

NOTE: The profile merger utility does not migrate the user settings from all the profiles, but only migrates or merges the user data from all the profiles.

Then follow the following instruction on how to merge 3 or 4 user profiles into one.

1. From the express share, navigate to the profilemerger.exe utility as above.
2. The Welcome page appears. It displays the name of the computer and the domain to which the computer belongs. Click Next.
3. The Merge Multiple Users page appears. All the user profiles available on the computer are displayed. Select the profiles to be migrated from the Source column.

   Select <Domain name>\<user 1> and <Domain name>\<user 2>.

4. From the Destination column, select the destination user profile for each source user profile. Click Next.

   Select <Domain name>\<user 3>.

   Note: If any disconnected users exist on the computer, then the Include Disconnected Users check box is enabled. You can select this check box to include the profiles of disconnected users.

   
5. Select the files and folders and add the file types to copy to the destination profile. Click Next.

   In the Files\Folders and File Types tabs, click Select All.

6. Click Next to start the migration.
7. After the merging is completed, a summary screen appears. Review the summary.

   Click Finish to close Profile Merger.

Windows Firewall Manipulator

Altiris PC Transplant has a nice utility that can be used to modify your windows firewall allow certain ports access to pass through or deny certain ports access on the workstation. This utility comes in handy when you are trying to install Altiris NS Agent or the AClient to your workstations.

Here are a couple of situations you might find this use full to use:

If the destination computer is running Windows XP with Service Pack 2, the firewall on the destination computer is turned on, and the required migration port is blocked, preventing the source computer from communicating with the destination agent.

There are three solutions to this problem.

• Disable the firewall. This can be done by navigating to Control Panel > Security Center > Windows firewall > General Tab, and selecting the Off option.
• Use the Windows Firewall Manipulator tool, provided with PC Transplant, to open port number 4949 and allow any application on the Windows XP Service Pack 2 computer to communicate with any applications running on the other computer.
• Add the PCTRTDestAgent.exe into exception list of the firewall automatically while pushing PCTRTDestAgent.exe on destination machine. This can be done only if the "Don't allow Exception" option is cleared and the "File and Printer Sharing" option is selected in the firewall's exception list.

Altiris Encrypted Password Generator

You can pass any string to the Password Encryption tool to get it converted to an encrypted string. The encrypted string can be passed with the command-line options that accept passwords.

A new switch -DecryptPwd is also included. -DecryptPwd must be passed when using encrypted passwords from the command line. This switch decrypts all the encrypted passwords provided from the command line.

You cannot use encrypted and unencrypted passwords together with a command-line option.
 

PC Transplant, Part 2: Real-Time Migrations