The university has recently negotiated special pricing to purchase Altiris. Because of the need to support more automated maintenence of computers, and the pricing aspect, we decided to purchase it as well. Since we own the software, it is probably a decent idea to actually use it.
The first thing I did was download the "Client Management Suite" from Altiris' website. This suite contains what seems like an endless number of Altiris client packages and the Altiris Notification Server. The Notificiation Server can be installed seperately, but I chose the large package approach because we have licenses for many of the Altiris products.
It's probably important to note that the functionality in the Altiris products is very segregated. For example, Deployment Agent and the Sofware Delivery Agent address different issues even though their names sound extremely similar. This is the case for all of the Altiris clients. This can be extremely confusing, especially when there is overlap between agent functionality. For example, it is possible to deploy software through both of the following agents. Whip out your Venn Diagrams to understand the problem. This issue makes it difficult to understand the correct solution to use for a particular problem.
Additionally, don't install the Altiris Notification Server on a machine running anything else. The default deployment plays stampy the elephant on any .net applications you may already have running. The installation may not screw up other things if you have only ASP.NET 1.1 applications. However, if you have 2.0 applications this WILL NOT WORK. They register a ASAPI dll that doesn't seem to work with any 2.0 application. Most people install web applications to their own virtual directory and set the configuration at that level, but apperently the developers of Altiris don't know or care about doing this correctly.
Once the Notification Server is installed, the Altiris client needs to be distributed to the computers on the network. The client can do a number of different things, including installing other Altiris agents that do a myriad of other things.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
hitachi jumper clip to 32 gigs
I had 2 250 gig Hitachi drives that were showing up in my BIOS and operating system as 33.8 gigabytes. A while back certain operating systems had a 32gig limit on the drive size that would be recognized by the operating system. To support this, drives were shipped with jumpers to allow them to be "clipped" at 32 gigs.
Looking at this objectively, it seems like a really silly thing to do. Why spend the extra money to buy a drive that you are going to clip back to 32 gigs. Also, I don't recall EVER having an operating system that couldn't support more than 32 gigs. The fact that it wasn't an issue back in 1999 when I purchased my first >32 gig drive (40 to be exact), I don't see why 9 years later drives are still being shipped with this fairly terrible hack. This is mostly justifying my lack of attention to the different jumper settings on the drive. It just seems pretty amazing that after working with computers heavily since 1994, this is the first time I've ever run across this problem.
Looking at this objectively, it seems like a really silly thing to do. Why spend the extra money to buy a drive that you are going to clip back to 32 gigs. Also, I don't recall EVER having an operating system that couldn't support more than 32 gigs. The fact that it wasn't an issue back in 1999 when I purchased my first >32 gig drive (40 to be exact), I don't see why 9 years later drives are still being shipped with this fairly terrible hack. This is mostly justifying my lack of attention to the different jumper settings on the drive. It just seems pretty amazing that after working with computers heavily since 1994, this is the first time I've ever run across this problem.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
SQL Counting Multiple Columns With Criteria
When doing counts, sometimes you want to count a record only when it meets a certain criteria. This can be annoying because the criteria generally needs to be posted in the "where" clause. This will give you only one count per sql query. If you want to have multiple counts per sql query you need to do sub-queries that can be costly.
select (Select count(FavoriteCandy) from mytable where FavoriteCandy='Tootsie Rolls') as TootsieCount, (Select count(FavoriteCandy) from mytable where FavoriteCandy='Baby Ruth') as BabyRuthCount
While this works it is really expensive. If multiple different counts over a large number of records is required, this method is not appropriate. While parusing the vast internets I ran into a different way of accomplishing the same task. I much prefer it to the former method.
select SUM(CASE when FavoriteCandy='Tootsie Rolls' THEN 1 END) as TootsieCount,SUM(CASE when FavoriteCandy='Baby Ruth' THEN 1 END) as BabyRuthCount from mytable
This treats the successful records as the number one and then sums the number of successes. When trying to count a number of different columns with criteria, this is definitly a cleaner and faster way to make the magic happen.
select (Select count(FavoriteCandy) from mytable where FavoriteCandy='Tootsie Rolls') as TootsieCount, (Select count(FavoriteCandy) from mytable where FavoriteCandy='Baby Ruth') as BabyRuthCount
While this works it is really expensive. If multiple different counts over a large number of records is required, this method is not appropriate. While parusing the vast internets I ran into a different way of accomplishing the same task. I much prefer it to the former method.
select SUM(CASE when FavoriteCandy='Tootsie Rolls' THEN 1 END) as TootsieCount,SUM(CASE when FavoriteCandy='Baby Ruth' THEN 1 END) as BabyRuthCount from mytable
This treats the successful records as the number one and then sums the number of successes. When trying to count a number of different columns with criteria, this is definitly a cleaner and faster way to make the magic happen.
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