Dell KACE1000 + Casper Suite

[Eigger]

Dell gave us a demo of the KACE K1000 and K2000. Anybody here have used K1000 Apple Patch management? Or have used the solution in Tandem with Casper Suite? I like that you can subscribe to receive the latest patches from many software companies and push it to your client. There are other tools in the interface too to manage macs but we ran out of time so never get to see it.

[georgecm12]

I haven't used it myself, but from what I've heard of it, I'm not particularly impressed.

If you want a patch management solution now and don't want to wait for whatever Jamf may finally come up with, I'd look at Munki instead. Free and open source, and it's really quite good at what it does.

[rtrouton]

I'm using a setup very similar to that, where the KBox is providing software update management for both our Macs and PCs. For that specific purpose and for the purpose of gathering inventory from my Macs, I've been pretty happy with it. One of the strengths of the patching component for the Macs is that I can reject the delta OS updates and have the KBox only deploy the Combo OS updates to our machines that need to be updated to the latest OS rev. Even those machines that would normally only get the delta get the Combo update.

However, we've needed additional capability for third-party software deployments, configuration management, and self-service deployments. The KBox 1000 came up pretty short on the Mac side for those purposes, so we purchased Casper to fill that need. We use the KBox for patching, and Casper for pretty much everything else. One other weakness is that Kace is relatively slow to support new versions of OS X, with Dell taking 90 days or longer following the OS's release to provide a KBox agent that supports the OS and start providing OS updates for that OS.

I've written a few posts about Kace and KBox on my blog. Those posts should be available via the link below:

http://derflounder.wordpress.com/?s=Kace+OR+KBox

[Eigger]

@Mr. Rich, Thats exactly what I have in mind after I saw the Patching capability of K1000. We have a hybrid environment and patching windows and mac using 1 interface might be a better solution for us. The only thing thats holding me back is what you mentioned of Dells lack of ability to come up with the the latest agent for new versions of OS X as fast as possible, and the price. I dont know if I should just wait for JAMF on what they promised to be included in the next generation of Casper Suite (3rd Party Patching and JDS 2.0). K1000 is around 15K base price, having 2 servers doing the same thing in the future might be a waste of money.

[gmarnin]

Munki Autopkg Reposado is free and does a better job at managing and installing software updates than any commercial product.

[gabester]

@gmarnin Reposado with Margarita make this manageable even for relatively non-technical people to manage patching.

One of these days I've really got to get around to posting a writeup on what I did at my last job to get Reposado working at my last job - pulling down the master catalog, parsing out all the unwanted junk that takes up too much space like the language and voice packs & major app updates for things we don't support, syncing the desired catalog(s) out to several hundred distributed site servers running Win2k8 Server and IIS7 and then a vbscript on each server to ensure that all the links point to the local server and not the master. The biggest trick was getting the client rewrite/redirect rules loaded on IIS - turns out most of the code I found on the 'net for that didn't work and I needed to remove a leading ^ in my environment.

I still can't get my head wrapped around what Munki does compared to Casper... and we keep meaning to implement Autopkg here to save some time on the tedium of app updates. g=

[gmarnin]

[@Sterritt](@Sterritt) agreed.

Do you have any scripts (vbscript or other) to manage Reposado on Win2k8 Server? Are you also running Margarita on Win2k8 Server?