To start, I'll give you an idea of where I'm coming from. I'm a work study student at a community college assisting the campus network administrator. As far as I can tell, most of his administration experience dealing with large numbers of windows boxes (~900 here) is through Novel Netware and eDirectory and the associated tools.
He's expecting that he will have to get rid of Netware in the near future and plan to move to AD (he has a controller set up, but nothing is using it) In the meantime, I'm getting tasked with doing a little research and testing on some things.
I recently set up a WSUS server and a couple of test boxes. Hopefully he will have time soon to configure Zen to do the registry tweaks to point everything locally (thats right, 900 machines have been hitting up the internet for windows updates)
Now he wants a way, for starters, to push out updates to Adobe Reader, and possibly CS3. He'd also like to eventually be able to do updates for as much software as possible.
I'm pretty lost. I know very little about this sort of thing, except that without using AD or eDirectory this seems like a horrible idea *shrug*
Most of what I've come up with seems to be pointing me to using SCCM or some kind of logon script. Of course, a logon script means logging on as an admin on everything, which is (imo) crap. I've done a little reading up on it, and while SCCM seems powerful, it's also complex and pretty out of my league at the moment. Is this what we need to be prepared to use though?
In the meantime, is there another/simpler way to push out at least the Adobe Reader updates and maybe some other things without using AD/Novel? Just asking that sounds like a horrible question, but it's kinda what Im stuck with.
Thanks for reading.
Cliffs:
-Im doing workstudy with a CC admin
-We use Novel eDirectory, and might have to ditch it very soon
-We dont have AD in use yet
-Ive been asked to find a way to push out updates for Adobe Reader, and maybe CS3
-I have almost no idea how to handle any of this.
-Halp.
And if you're lazy, thanks for reading the cliffs 😉
He's expecting that he will have to get rid of Netware in the near future and plan to move to AD (he has a controller set up, but nothing is using it) In the meantime, I'm getting tasked with doing a little research and testing on some things.
I recently set up a WSUS server and a couple of test boxes. Hopefully he will have time soon to configure Zen to do the registry tweaks to point everything locally (thats right, 900 machines have been hitting up the internet for windows updates)
Now he wants a way, for starters, to push out updates to Adobe Reader, and possibly CS3. He'd also like to eventually be able to do updates for as much software as possible.
I'm pretty lost. I know very little about this sort of thing, except that without using AD or eDirectory this seems like a horrible idea *shrug*
Most of what I've come up with seems to be pointing me to using SCCM or some kind of logon script. Of course, a logon script means logging on as an admin on everything, which is (imo) crap. I've done a little reading up on it, and while SCCM seems powerful, it's also complex and pretty out of my league at the moment. Is this what we need to be prepared to use though?
In the meantime, is there another/simpler way to push out at least the Adobe Reader updates and maybe some other things without using AD/Novel? Just asking that sounds like a horrible question, but it's kinda what Im stuck with.
Thanks for reading.
Cliffs:
-Im doing workstudy with a CC admin
-We use Novel eDirectory, and might have to ditch it very soon
-We dont have AD in use yet
-Ive been asked to find a way to push out updates for Adobe Reader, and maybe CS3
-I have almost no idea how to handle any of this.
-Halp.
And if you're lazy, thanks for reading the cliffs 😉
