Re: Administration Suite for Clients in an Windows/Mac Network with Win2003 Server

[Ansgar Wiechers <bugtraq () planetcobalt net>]

On 2011-01-18 Oliver Möller wrote:
> I'm following your list for quite a while now - I hope this is the
> right place for my Question.
>
> Since a few months I am responsible for the administration of all
> IT-based topics in my Company.
> I am looking for an administration Suite to cover topics like Updates,
> Security, System-Configuration.

Well, this is more a general system administration question, but since
that normally has at least some security implications you're at least
half-on-topic.

> We have the following general Setup:
>
> ---
> 6 Netbooks with Win7 Starter for presentation purposes and ERP
>
> 10 Notebooks and PCs with Win7 Prof and WinXP Prof/Home - also for
> Presentation and ERP
>
> 6 Mac Mini Snow Leopard for Presentation, Web-Browsing and
> MediaStreaming via Apple Airport Express
>
> and finally Windows 2003 Server
> ---
>
> I would be fine with managing all the windows-based PCs and do the
> Macs manually - even thats seems not too easy to me.
>
> Because of the rather small size of the Network I try to not spending
> to much money (preferably free). I've already asked google for client
> management and similar stuff but would never get a really good result.
>
> Do you have any ideas, recommendations, tips?

Do you have an Active Directory already? If not, that's what you want.
Windows boxes can be managed just fine via group policies in an AD
environment. There are some pitfalls, though (FSMO roles, redundancy,
authoritative restore of DCs, etc.), so make sure you know what you're
doing there. Avoid using .local as the domain-suffix, because Apple uses
this suffix for their zeroconf implementation (Bonjour).

For the Macs you probably want to get a Mac OS X server, create an Open
Directory, and integrate that with your AD (google for "golden
triangle setup").

For Windows Updates you'd install WSUS [1], for Mac updates use the SUS
that comes with OS X Server.

As for third party software updates, I don't think there's something as
"fire and forget" as the built-in update mechanisms. On the Mac platform
you can push software via ARD [2] to the clients, on the Windows
platform you can use group policies to deploy MSI packages. In any case
you'll have to manually provision the software.

Group policy deployments work for MSI only, BTW. If you have executables
or zip files or something, you'll need to (re-)package them as MSI, e.g.
with Microsoft's free Windows XML Installer Toolkit [3].

For further consulting you'll have to provide more details about your
requirements.

HTH

[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/wsus/default
[2] http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/
[3] http://wix.sourceforge.net/

Regards
Ansgar Wiechers
-- 
"All vulnerabilities deserve a public fear period prior to patches
becoming available."
--Jason Coombs on Bugtraq

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