On Oct 12, 2006, at 1:01 PM, R. Mariotti wrote: > Therefore, is anyone USING a linux-based facility to manage remote > windows-based desktops for the purposes of patches, updates, admin, > etc? > Of course, we would prefer open sourced facilities but certainly will > look at licensed software if necessary. > > Any thoughts, ideas, directions would be greatly appreciated.
It isn't what you're asking for, but I have worked in a shop where all the developers had dual-boot workstations running Debian & Windows. The interesting bit was that they generally all prefered and worked in Linux, and used VMWare to run the Windows partition from within Debian. If for some reason that didn't work, they could always do a full reboot to the other platform, but for most things, it was enough to be able to switch to the virtual machine, do whatever they had to do, then switch back to Debian. One nice side effect of this setup was easy restoreablility: if the Windows side ever got corrupted, as tends to happen given enough time, they could just overwrite the Windows partition with a backup copy of the Windows boot image -- no reinstall needed, just `dd` it over the old one and go. You could get similar results with Parallels & Boot Camp on a Mac, too -- just have a copy of the Parallels ~/Library/Parallels/winxp/ winxp.hdd image file backed up as a .dmg elsewhere on the same system, and if you ever need to do an instant "set things back to the last working state", just delete the .hdd file and replace it with the .dmg, &/or use Disk Utility to restore that .dmg onto the Windows boot partition. * * * This of course addresses none of your questions about remotely managing things, but ideally it would either eliminate the need for central management, or make central management easier, by e.g. having an admin back at the home office update their own copy of the Windows .hdd / .dmg / .iso / etc, then distribute that as a replacement to the field workers's computers. -- Chris Devers _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
