initial thoughts
Verfasst: 21 Dez 2009, 05:24
Hello,
We are a medium size company with around 50-60 windows computers, and been looking at Opsi in order to evaluate if it meets our needs any better then the current maze of products (such as unattended, wpkg, custom open source inventory program called lintory). In doing so I need to identify the good parts as well as the not so good parts. So far my observations are (no particular order):
* Many components appear in German, which I can't read. For example, this website defaults to German, I had to guess how to log in as I could not read the prompts for username/password. Also I noticed in the ISO distributed ISO file the default X keyboard map seems to be german layout, making it rather confusing, and the opsi packages, as referenced in the documentation at http://download.uib.de/opsi3.4/produkte/essential are in German.
* The Windows 7 support is of interest to us.
* Similarly, the license management is of interest to us. Later on we might end up trialling both of these. (maybe not right before Christmas...)
* We would be very interested in Linux client support. As the first step, even if this was limited to hardware inventory only (ideally without having to reboot the computer).
Some features we have implemented in our current inventory program, and find very useful, that do not seem to be possible (and some might be difficult to implement in opsi) include:
* The ability to search for computers by mac address.
* Ability to flag duplicated mac addresses.
* Multiple OS installed on one machine. e.g. several of our machines dual boot Windows XP and Windows 7. This might be difficult...
* Removable hard disks. Ok, this starts getting complicated one two of our computers where users can swap hard disks between two identical computers, and raises issues with software licenses. e.g. OEM windows licenses, does a software install count as a software install if the hard disk is removed, etc.
* Ability to specify where each computer is located and print map of which computers are physically located at what location in building.
* Ability to list what department owns the computers and search for all computers based on owner.
* Ability to list who uses what computers and search for computers based on user.
* Ability to track hardware, e.g. laptop power supplies, and answer questions like "Who had that power supply last?" and "what happened to that big expensive graphics card we purchased and was in this machine last year?"
* Ability to list computers that are not being used, with capabilities, e.g. help answer the question "I need X desktop computers, are any of these spare computers sufficient?"
Unfortunately I don't think OPSI supports any of these.
Open question: are multiple networks, each with different IP address range supported? So far I can't see any reason why this shouldn't work, still in early stages of testing however (still need to try and free up hardware to test it out on properly).
Still not sure of the unattended installation (do all Microsoft updates get installed? What about driver support in Windows XP?) however not been able to test this yet.
One of my major complaints with wpkg, it is time consuming trying to keep the central packages list up-to-date with the latest versions of Firefox, Adobe Reader, Flash, Java etc. It seems these products are constantly getting new security updates. Not only that, but some programs occasionally break badly when upgraded and require manual hacking on each computer to fix (eg. PDFcreator - install/upgrade/remove all failed). wpkg doesn't seem to allow testing a product upgrade before making it available company wide either. As a result, updates tend to lapse despite having wpkg to help.
I guess I just like being able to type in "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" via ssh session to a Debian box and have everything happen automatically. Does opsi do anything to address these problems?
Would be interested in any comments on my feedback.
Thanks
Brian May
We are a medium size company with around 50-60 windows computers, and been looking at Opsi in order to evaluate if it meets our needs any better then the current maze of products (such as unattended, wpkg, custom open source inventory program called lintory). In doing so I need to identify the good parts as well as the not so good parts. So far my observations are (no particular order):
* Many components appear in German, which I can't read. For example, this website defaults to German, I had to guess how to log in as I could not read the prompts for username/password. Also I noticed in the ISO distributed ISO file the default X keyboard map seems to be german layout, making it rather confusing, and the opsi packages, as referenced in the documentation at http://download.uib.de/opsi3.4/produkte/essential are in German.
* The Windows 7 support is of interest to us.
* Similarly, the license management is of interest to us. Later on we might end up trialling both of these. (maybe not right before Christmas...)
* We would be very interested in Linux client support. As the first step, even if this was limited to hardware inventory only (ideally without having to reboot the computer).
Some features we have implemented in our current inventory program, and find very useful, that do not seem to be possible (and some might be difficult to implement in opsi) include:
* The ability to search for computers by mac address.
* Ability to flag duplicated mac addresses.
* Multiple OS installed on one machine. e.g. several of our machines dual boot Windows XP and Windows 7. This might be difficult...
* Removable hard disks. Ok, this starts getting complicated one two of our computers where users can swap hard disks between two identical computers, and raises issues with software licenses. e.g. OEM windows licenses, does a software install count as a software install if the hard disk is removed, etc.
* Ability to specify where each computer is located and print map of which computers are physically located at what location in building.
* Ability to list what department owns the computers and search for all computers based on owner.
* Ability to list who uses what computers and search for computers based on user.
* Ability to track hardware, e.g. laptop power supplies, and answer questions like "Who had that power supply last?" and "what happened to that big expensive graphics card we purchased and was in this machine last year?"
* Ability to list computers that are not being used, with capabilities, e.g. help answer the question "I need X desktop computers, are any of these spare computers sufficient?"
Unfortunately I don't think OPSI supports any of these.
Open question: are multiple networks, each with different IP address range supported? So far I can't see any reason why this shouldn't work, still in early stages of testing however (still need to try and free up hardware to test it out on properly).
Still not sure of the unattended installation (do all Microsoft updates get installed? What about driver support in Windows XP?) however not been able to test this yet.
One of my major complaints with wpkg, it is time consuming trying to keep the central packages list up-to-date with the latest versions of Firefox, Adobe Reader, Flash, Java etc. It seems these products are constantly getting new security updates. Not only that, but some programs occasionally break badly when upgraded and require manual hacking on each computer to fix (eg. PDFcreator - install/upgrade/remove all failed). wpkg doesn't seem to allow testing a product upgrade before making it available company wide either. As a result, updates tend to lapse despite having wpkg to help.
I guess I just like being able to type in "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" via ssh session to a Debian box and have everything happen automatically. Does opsi do anything to address these problems?
Would be interested in any comments on my feedback.
Thanks
Brian May
