Migration

I have seen in my personal experience that most companies still today go about the hard and difficult way in migrating user data from the old machine to the new machine. Some technicians will ask the user where all his files and folders are that needs to be migrated or copied across to his new computer, which is always a problem as the user can't always remember where he has saved all his work or important documents. Which always results in loss of data and an upset user.

Is your organization moving from Novell Imaging to using ONLY Altiris DS? Did your organization use Image safe data during imaging? Are you still going to have Novell Client / Agent in in POST Altiris world? If you answer yes to all of these questions you will need to have a way to remove the image safe data. In the Novell world you would simply add a line to your linux script to call zisedit -c or zisedit -r and this would clean out the image safe data. But since you are now imaging with DS, this cannot be done directly in Altiris.

When imaging using Linux there are times when you want to deploy an image from another location other than the eXpress share, doing this can get pretty messy or downright impossible. The main issue is that you cannot just simply go to the Distribute Disk Image task and just browse for the image that you want to deploy if it is not on the eXpress share.

When an administrator user logs on to a Windows Vista computer, two access tokens are created: a filtered standard user access token, and a full administrator access token. Instead of launching the desktop (Explorer.exe) with the administrator's access token, the standard user access token is used. All child processes inherit from this initial launch of the desktop (the explorer.exe process), which helps limit Windows Vista's attack surface. By default, all users, including administrators, log on to a Windows Vista computer as standard users.

A while back I released v1.0 of PCExporter, a Visual Basic 6 application which allows you to export as a text file clients in the Deployment Solution eXpress database. By request i've added a couple of features -namely to allow NT Authentication and to attach to databases other than those named eXpress.

The Symantec Endpoint Protection Integration Component allows users to leverage the Altiris platform to facilitate deployments and migrations to Symantec Endpoint Protection. This article will outline the migration process that the Integration Component uses and how to create custom migrations.

Part of nearly every Altiris Notification Server implementation includes Software Delivery. Software Delivery enables us to, well, deliver software, but also provides us distribution points, policy-based actions on client computers, and repeatable, dependent rollout of system and application changes. No doubt the longer you have utilized Software Delivery, the more collections, packages, and tasks you have created. When it comes time to rebuild your Notification Server or move to a new NS, migrating the SWD infrastructure can become very, very time consuming. This article will demonstrate how to migrate your existing SWD tasks to a newly built server without recreating all the necessary items by hand.

PCExporter is a Visual Basic 6 application which allows you to export clients from Deployment Solution's eXpress database. The output is in the format recommended by Altiris for importing through the console.

When using the high-powered personality capture capabilities of PC Transplant in a large migration, it sometimes make sense to use PCT from the command line. In one case, it was the only way that the tool was able to function to help in a migration project.