Hello
Dick Venema wrote:
But from the reactions I hear, everybody complains. Are there success stories?
Yes, there are. My team members and I have created a setup in an
educational environment (Department of Physics [1] at ETH Zurich
[2]) with currently around 60 WinXP workstations (still growing)
with around 50 applications, where the users only have users
rights. We already have around 150 Linux workstations which are
managed in a similar way.
[1] http://www.phys.ethz.ch/
[2] http://www.ethz.ch/
We have everthing automated, starting form the installation of
Windows over netboot (PXE), installing applications according to
the needs of the workstation and joining it to our Samba-Domain.
The installation takes around 1 - 2 hours (depending on the power
of the workstation and numbers of applications) without any
intervention until the user can log in.
For the netboot we use PXELINUX [3]. The base Windows install is
done with Unattended [4] and the applications install is done with
wpkg [5]. For inventory we use OCS Inventory [6], which also runs
on our Linux workstations. We need the inventory to count the
installed applications which need a license, so we can order them
in the central software system from our University. Monitoring of
all workstations and servers is done with Big Brother [7].
[3] http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php
[4] http://unattended.sourceforge.net/
[5] http://wpkg.org/
[6] http://ocsinventory.sourceforge.net/
[7] http://www.bb4.org/
Sure we had to do some glue scripting (mostly .cmd) too motivate
all this tools to work together for our needs. wpkg runs (in the
background as system task) at startup or once in the early morning
(if the workstation is running) to upgrade applications. Windows
and MS Office updates are done through a local WSUS server.
So far the users do not complain about the missing administrative
rights, but are happy that we keep their workstations up-to-date.
In some groups the local IT person has an additional account with
administrator right, mainly to install special software (eg. CAM)
which we could not motivate for silent install. If a workstation
gets "killed", we simply do a fresh install.
bye
Fabian
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
