I found a way to get workstations to import without having them as members of our AD domain! The b-i-g problem we've had with Zen workstation importing has been our scads of DNS sub-domains. Everything has its own subdomain.
ts.wwu.edu
admcs.wwu.edu
atus.wwu.edu
spmc.wwu.edu
restek.wwu.edu
hh125.wwu.edu
...
So throwing a "zenwsimport" entry in each won't work. And since we have no unified desktop configuration, we can't tell the desktop folk to "always set up .wwu.edu as a look-up domain" and do it that way. I had somewhat solved this one earlier by putting "zenwsimport" into the Active Directory DNS domain which all domained PCs have in their resolve list. This got about 1100 machines at its height.
But far from every machine on campus is domained. How do we pick up the stragglers?
Turns out the answer to that one is to create a force-run application object associated to our Users context (not students). That runs the "zwsimp -importserver zenwsimport.yadda.edu" command on the local workstation, and in the last 40 minutes I've had well over 100 machines register. And we're now over 1200 machines imported! Yay! Unfortunately I don't have a real good idea how many non-lab desktops we have out there, so I'm not sure what percentage of the total that 1200 represents.
And for those of you WWU paranoids reading this (I think I have a few) this doesn't do much of anything to your machines. It gives your workstation a presence in NDS, and allows some nifty tricks. The best trick is allowing your local SYSTEM account access to WUF-hosted files so automated processes running in the local Task Scheduler can update files on the cluster. Neat, eh?
Tags: novell, zenworks
ts.wwu.edu
admcs.wwu.edu
atus.wwu.edu
spmc.wwu.edu
restek.wwu.edu
hh125.wwu.edu
...
So throwing a "zenwsimport" entry in each won't work. And since we have no unified desktop configuration, we can't tell the desktop folk to "always set up .wwu.edu as a look-up domain" and do it that way. I had somewhat solved this one earlier by putting "zenwsimport" into the Active Directory DNS domain which all domained PCs have in their resolve list. This got about 1100 machines at its height.
But far from every machine on campus is domained. How do we pick up the stragglers?
Turns out the answer to that one is to create a force-run application object associated to our Users context (not students). That runs the "zwsimp -importserver zenwsimport.yadda.edu" command on the local workstation, and in the last 40 minutes I've had well over 100 machines register. And we're now over 1200 machines imported! Yay! Unfortunately I don't have a real good idea how many non-lab desktops we have out there, so I'm not sure what percentage of the total that 1200 represents.
And for those of you WWU paranoids reading this (I think I have a few) this doesn't do much of anything to your machines. It gives your workstation a presence in NDS, and allows some nifty tricks. The best trick is allowing your local SYSTEM account access to WUF-hosted files so automated processes running in the local Task Scheduler can update files on the cluster. Neat, eh?
Tags: novell, zenworks