Hello All, I just want to start out by saying hello to all of you. I am in need of some answers to an application that can do what I want it to do. I am working for a company that hosts about the networked labs. Each lab consisting of over a hundered computers. The network admin will call me up and ask for specific patch upgrades, application installs, removing certain applications on each system etc. As you can tell this is a tedious duty to go to individual systems and perform these specific requests on each computer. I was wondering if their was an application that can be hosted to a server and from that point can have control of the entire lab of computers to initiate the specific requests that are needed. For instance if I need to remove certain applications, I can use the server to go and initate a command and all of the systems will remove that specific application automatically. Or if I need to install a specific application I can install it on all of the pc's automatically etc. I was just wondering if you fine individuals would know if a specific program exists or any leads on this specific miracle program. It would be very appreciated if you can help me on this. Thank you, Cyborgfx53
If you are in an MS Active Directory environment, you can use Group policy to push/advertise applications, and once installed through this method, you can uninstall too. If you've got the money, you can also use System Center Configuration Manager 2007, or SMS 2005 (same thing, different versions) It sounds like this might be the ideal solution for you, as it's a very powerful tool, but I don't know how willing your IT group would be to push out something like this due to the cost and how long it takes to configure/manage. Now if you're using linux or osx, then I have no idea
As far as I know, XP Pro isn't built for that kind of use - you need a server OS. There might be additional software you can purchase for it, but that's out of my league sorry.
If all the systems are running the same setup you can still use Group Policies to adjust them, but you would need one central server running an MS Server OS, not XP Pro, which 'pushes' out the configuration wanted to the client machines. If the systems are configured independently then your pretty much stuck at making a policy for every PC that needs a different set-up. Admittedly you an make a generic one first that only needs slight tweaking to fit the changes for different systems but it is still a pain - at least your not having to leave the main server room though . It might be possible to to do this on XP, but I've only ever had XP as the client to Server 2003.
well if he has 100's of computers, he can't be in a workgroup. but yeah if they're all unnetworked then you're going to have to go to each one. There are a couple programs that can inventory whats on a computer (www.spiceworks.com for example) which would tell you where to go; but without getting into an active directory environment, there's no way that I know that you can remotely uninstall/install applications easily on a mass scale.
