Cleanup

We have Altiris Notification Server with a few solutions for about 15 months now. Currently NS manages 1500 client PCs. Altiris provides great solutions and they are very easy to modify for your environment. But a few months ago I discovered two problems that took me some time to investigate...

Do you have unnecessary machines that are not in use, but are still present in the MSDE database in your Deployment Server? Is there a way to clean them out?

This is a script that will allow the user to clean all old machines manually from the MSDE database. Go to Deployment Server 6.5 build > Tools > Options, then check the box to clean out old computers by date range.

Recently, I created a layer of Office 2007 and when I ran the SVS Cleaner tool, I realised that it was cleaning too much. So, I wrote an SVSClean.csv configuration file for SVS Cleaner that is compatible with Office 2007.

The attached file adds Office 2007 support to my SVS Cleaner utility.

Want to clean-up and make your SQL pretty. SQL Parser is nice. The link provides downloads for all types of parsers....

http://www.sqlparser.com/download.php

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".

Migrating from any infrastructure technology to another can be (and usually is) a huge undertaking that's fraught with unexpected gotchas. If you're tempted to migrate away from Novell and toward Altiris, you're in luck -- one of our readers has bravely blazed the trail.

Learn what steps to take (and which ones to avoid) in this series by one who's gone before.

Like many organizations, we didn't start managing workstations with Altiris. Once upon a time the Novell Application Launcher was used to deliver software to our workstations. At the time it worked for what we needed. Getting software to desktops and making critical updates to applications. However, with the threat of audit we quickly had to pick up a product to perform inventory information. Initial data from that product was not reliable and couldn't interface with our Novell software delivery system. It led to a duplication of effort that just took up too much time and left holes that would put us out of compliance with our software contracts.

Fortunately for us we had a vendor recommend Altiris.