I've been playing with Unattended for about the same time. Have never made a good sell to the service desk folks here. Ghost always wins for the initial install.
quite the reverse here :)
We have been using a combination of tools to try to meet our needs. It's not pretty at this point. Made up of the following:b) Are there any suggestions or ideas about good ways to go about it?
. Aida32 run on login daily if possible. It E-mails a .csv to a script that sticks in into a directory structure. It gives an abundance of PC information and allows you to view it as a spreadsheet or, input it into Aida32 and let it sort things out. Aida32 was a freeware/closed source application that was (as I understand it) sold out to a company and now it is under a new name and has costs.
so it's really not a choice for most of us?
. All installs are wrapped up using ISTool/Inno and saved in a directory structure so that they _all_ install with the same command line. Service Desk does not need to know how we want WordPerfect installed, just that every install is called the same way. This competes with the unattended way of having .bat files for everything, adds complexity in that all applications have to be wrapped up this way, but makes it much easier to have newbies start doing installs.
I'm not familiar with that.
can we wrap installing every application using ISTool/Inno, even those that _must_ be clicked through?
. PCs run a homemade server. It spawns and receives command via stunnel. An MD5 password hash is used to make sure legitimate techs are requesting commands. This service runs as system, so, for example, you can send a cmd.exe and start up a system level command window. One of the requests is for it to do an install. It takes this install requests, finds it on a web server because of the directory structure, and runs it. Again, since all installs run the same way... :). There is no interface for the user to see in the systray like vnc, although that would be nice.
What kind of software is it?
I tried installing all sorts of SSH servers on Windows, but wasn't very impressed (especially when it comes to the silent installation).
. Techs actually requests installs via the Linux server that holds all the installs. Once requested, the server poles to see if a client is available for an install. If so, sends the request to it. The PC will announce when it _thinks_ it has completed the install back to the server so that more packages can be sent :). E-mails the initiating tech when all installs are done.
So does it mean that every PC has to be updated manually (i.e., installer launched by a tech personnel?).
. This hack of a web interface the techs use will tell them if the PC is up, let them search for PCs on different criteria, and show some of the info from Aida32. It also lists all the packages so that they can be requested.
. Started to make Wake-On-LAN into the mix, but with so many different machines and no time to test it did not get very far.
. The aida32 script also checks to see if anything needs to be installed using a simple CSV file and if so, requests the updates.
. Status information is forwarded to Jabber just like the old mainframe dazs :).
Some parts sound nice; could it be opened as an open source project, or perhaps not due to this Aida32 part?
Or perhaps some parts of it?
Tomek
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