Choosing the best deployment method

As always, we are given different methods to deploy the agents. We know that in the case of large environments, we long for remote and unattended solutions. No one can expect us to run through offices, and press the same buttons on every machine in order to install a certain application. That would be funny, imagine the system administrators skating through halls and departments on rollerblades. All jokes aside, point taken!

Then there are those situations where there are just a few computers to be managed, and asking for outstanding remote deployment solutions is just silly. The entire process of understanding, setting up, and getting around such a deployment method would be more time consuming than just doing it through a brute-force search.

Therefore, we are given more than a few options in this case too. We can install the OCS-NG agent manually. We can do the manual install on either the service version or the standalone type as well. This requires user interaction. On Windows machines, this means going through the steps of the installation wizard using the de facto standard: Next, Agree, Next, Next, Install, Finish style.

Then, we have the more interesting remote deployment methods. One of the ways is to use the Active Directory Group Policy Objects (GPOs), and set up a new policy or edit an existing one. What we want to accomplish is to find the appropriate policy's Script section. Soon, we will find out how to include the script here. Depending on the type of policy, the script is going to be executed either on the start of a computer or when the user logs in.

The other modality is pushing the deployment via login scripts. Yes, this is a slight variation to the technique just mentioned, which works best if the computer startup policy is used (this way it does not require a user to log in).You can set up login scripts via Active Directory GPOs too, but right now we're discussing session login scripts. These require the user to log in. We set these up on the domain controller. We'll see how we do this later on.

A final solution, considering remote deployment is to opt for third-party tools. The first thought that comes to mind for most system administrators is PsExec of PsTools. On the right section, we will see how to use this third-party tool to execute remote commands.

There are also a few best practices when using these methods. How can we know whether the agent would be set up or not? We create some sort of feedback files, or we push the scripts via PsExec during business hours on all computers that are currently online. We monitor the output and will know all the computers that are offline. Then, we can use either of the previously mentioned methods (computer startup scripts or login scripts) to set up the agent.

There is no best solution to how to set up the agent. It depends on our particular setup. If we have just a handful of computers, we might opt for the manual installation. The wizard has just a few steps, it's light weight and really fast. In the case of populated environments, we can opt for remote solutions. Otherwise, the process is time consuming.

It is a matter of preference which method we opt for. If you have a domain, you can use domain login scripts or computer startup scripts. It's also quite handy to use a combination of all of the methods.

We will now look into each of the solutions in greater detail.