Thoughts On Altiris

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.