Tuesday 23 September 2008

Speed up your deployment of Altiris NS Agents

In order to speed up the roll-out of NS Agents I use following method and vbs script

  • First of all create two collections : one with all major agents ( == the agents you want to install ) installed and one with not all major agents installed
  • Assign each of these collections to an Agent Configuration where the collection with not all major agents will request a config every 5 minutes and the other one with all major agents your default config request time
  • Create for every agent that you want to install a collection which gives you the resources without this agent installed
  • Create a VB script ( requires Altiris ADSK to work ) that will run every 5 minutes ( done with MS scheduling ) which will force a collection update of the previous defined collections

'---------------------------------------

' Setup management objects

'---------------------------------------

set collectionManagement = CreateObject("Altiris.ASDK.NS.CollectionManagement")

collectionManagement.TargetServer = "localhost"

collectionManagement.Authenticate()
'---------------------------------------

' UpdateCollections

'---------------------------------------

Rem Name: Pc's with all Major Agents installed ( SWD, Metering, Patch, CC, Aclient )

collectionManagement.UpdateCollections("{guid of your collection}")

Rem Name: Pc's with Not all Major Agents installed ( SWD, Metering, Patch, CC, Aclient )

collectionManagement.UpdateCollections("{guid of your collection}")

Rem Name: All Windows Computers without Software Update Agent

collectionManagement.UpdateCollections("{guid of your collection}")

Rem Name: Windows Computers with no Software Delivery Solution Agent

collectionManagement.UpdateCollections("{guid of your collection}")

Rem Name: All Windows Computers without Software Update Agent

collectionManagement.UpdateCollections("{guid of your collection}")

Rem Name: All Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 Computers with no Altiris Agent installed

collectionManagement.UpdateCollections("{guid of your collection}")

...........

Get your stopwatch ready and measure how fast your machines are equipped with all the right agents ...

If you find this post helpfull please leave a comment and don't forget to click on an AD ;-)

Thx,

Gert