As an ex-Altiris Admin

Story: Novell to Buy XenSource? Altiris?Total Replies: 4
Author Content
devnet

Jan 05, 2007
3:25 PM EDT
Altiris would be HUGE.

They have their claws deep in many fortune 500 companies AND they have both Linux and Windows offerings...including virtualization.

They make absolutely amazing software...I couldn't go without it when I worked at the large enterprise I used to work at...I couldn't imagine taking care of 12,500 desktops using something like Track-It or Insert_Other_Management_Software_Here. Altiris would put give Novell a HUGE shot in the arm and allow them to release tools for Linux server management (that also happens to support windows).

I find this very interesting...
tuxchick

Jan 05, 2007
3:33 PM EDT
Novell has always had awesome network management tools. So why do they, as a company, suck so much? Why does Active Directory, which should be called Acute Diaper Rash, dominate? So many mysteries...
devnet

Jan 06, 2007
8:18 AM EDT
Altiris is interesting...it can operate with or without Acute Diaper Rash...it can operate with a NFS as well and do scripted installations utilizing peer-2-peer for image download.

That made it AWESOME when I was deploying 250 PC's and trying to get an image on each and every one of them in a single day...I could do 50 at a time because they downloaded bits of the image from 'superseeds' around them...I'd do a batch of 5 quickly and then peer them out to the remaining...and I could hit 50 at one time with about an hour and fifteen minutes download time on them all :D

techiem2

Jan 06, 2007
9:02 AM EDT
Interesting. That sounds fairly similar to the Frisbee ( http://www.emulab.net/software.php3 ) imaging system. I have a little freebsd box setup with it, but I don't have boxes to really test with. (I did a quick test on a laptop and it worked well, but I really want to do a multimachine test).

Speaking of imaging, does anyone know of a foss tool similar to ghostwalk? We use partimage for most of the disk imaging now at the college where I work, but we are still stuck using ghostwalk to walk the SIDs on the silly winders boxes (yes, we could do it manually on all of them, but that adds significant time and hassle).
jdixon

Jan 06, 2007
11:43 AM EDT
FOSS, no, but NewSID is free and the source code is available: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Utilities/NewS...

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