Rapid deployment pack

[Simon Feldin]

I'm using RDP with altiris 5.5 SP2 and PIM 1.30 and i have some problems with Linux on Blade servers.

1. If i want to make an image of Linux (Red Hat AS 2.1), the server should boot with PXE through network and make image then reboot back into Linux. But instead it is constantly rebootin into Linux until i manually make it boot through PXE. With Windows i didn't had these preoblems.

2. Image creation spped with Linux is very slow. It takes for full instalation of Red Hat AS 2.1 about 2 hours to make an image. Again with Windows i didn't had these problems. The image was made in about 10-15 min.

Is these by design or is there some problems with altiris deployment agent for Linux?

Thank you for your answers

[Victor Pendlebury]

Hi Simon,

Which model of Blades are you running ?

What is the boot order in your PXE Boot File ? Is Local Boot the 1st choice ?


Regards

Victor

[Richard Mouser]

Simon,

Do you have the HP Server Management driver loaded on the target server? This driver is used by the Altiris Deployment agent to force the server to boot PXE. Lack of this driver is the most common reason for the symptom you are seeing.

On the imaging speed with Linux, it is slower because RDP 1.30 uses a disk prep followed by a sector by sector copy of the disk to do Linux imaging. The good news is that image capture is the slow part, image deployment is relatively faster, but still not as fast as Windows.

The next version of RDP includes new imaging technology that handles Linux ext2 & ext3 volumes just like it does Windows FAT and NTFS.

[Derek_31]

I hope that HP decides to drop the Altiris based RDP produc. The Altiris product requires very lax network and server security. In fact, I won't put it on a live network because of its requirements.

Microsoft's deployment solution is Server 2003 based and uses PKI and optionally Active Directory for authentication, so it's a lot more secure.

I've complained to my HP rep and others, but I never get any word back. They seem to take security seriously with the PSPs, but not deployment.