Backup

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.

When a tech support call to a large hardware manufacturer left my laptop unbootable, I found myself cursing the heavens. After I had calmed down, I remembered that my data was being protected by Symantec Backup Executive System Recovery 8. Perhaps this was not going to be as bad as I had initially feared. This article details my adventure into the not-so-well-documented world of system recovery.

This document is intended to outline how to deploy BESR and BESR LightsOut Recovery remotely and silently. You can use this method to mimic how Altiris Local Recovery Solution Pro was deployed to some degree. LightsOut Recovery allows you to recover a computer in a pre-boot state without needing the System Recovery Disk (SRD).

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.

Here's how to use the Patch Creation tool in Wise for Windows Installer Professional, Wise for Visual Studio .NET, and Wise Package Studio to create a patch (.MSP) to update a Windows Installer (.MSI) installation.

Here's a very nice piece on the how's and why's behind validating your installation packages. Dive into the deep end and get a good fast overview of validation and how to get the most out of it.

What if you wanted to take your Local Security Solution (LSS) data, and use Inventory Forwarding to move the data to a destination Notification Server? If you did this, you could have a backup of your managed passwords and have those passwords accessible on the destination server too. You can pull this of with Inventory Forwarding. Here's how to configure your Notification Server to do this.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking at the backup options on our SQL servers and noticed that we didn't have very good backups of our Altiris database. I wanted to have a backup taken multiple times throught out the day with the date and timestamp in the filename so I had an easy way to know where to go back to.