Recon Rollout Question

[#1]

Hello everyone

We are currently running Casper 6 sucessfully in our local office LAN and
want to rollout (in particular Recon) to our other offices in Western
Europe. Many of these are on slower links and do not have a large
infrastructure and certainly do not have OSX server. Other offices are
larger and have around 50 to 100 macs and a better osx backend and links. We
are trying to find a solution that best fits moving forward and planning the
best way to implement Recon to start. Essentially we need to run recon on
all of the macs in WEU to report on software licensing.

Question is: do people think it is a good idea to use a centrally managed
server from London and have them reporting back to our server or is it best
to go with asking the offices to install a local copy of osx server and run
their own versions? Ideally we would like to maintain control of the data
and be able to access (which I know you can do either way over http).
Ideally we would like to have a good booster server setup in the future that
we could share our applications, etc but at present that is not our main
goal.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

James

Grey Communications Group Limited
Registered No. 1795794, Registered in England
Registered Office The Johnson Building, 77 Hatton Garden, London, EC1N 8JS
VAT Number GB 404 6245 78

[talkingmoose]

Hi James!

If you have network connectivity then you don't really need to push the
Recon application to your Macs. That functionality is built into the small
JAMF binary file, which gets pushed when you add machines to your server.

Or you can use Recon on your own computer to scan a network segment and
connect to all the Macs on a network segment to take inventory. This
requires you know the admin names and passwords on each Mac.

As for a central JSS server I suggest just one. We have one in our Saint
Paul office that manages machines in more than a dozen sites, some of which
are international sites. To install software you do want to have local
software repository servers. We simply use our existing Windows file servers
in each local office.

--

bill

William M. Smith, Technical Analyst
MCS IT
Merrill Communications, LLC
(651) 632-1492

[ernstcs]

I would agree, the bandwidth utilization for just the recon piece of the Casper Suite is quite small, and having centralized data on one server is what you want anyway.

Craig Ernst
Systems Management and Configuration
+-------------------+
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
Learning and Technology Services
105 Garfield Ave
Eau Claire, WI 54701
Phone: (715) 836-3639
Fax: (715) 836-6001
+-------------------+
ernstcs at uwec.edu

[#4]

Thanks so much for your help guys. Much appreciated.

J

James Burnett
IT Support Manager

GREYgroup

Agency Network of the Year, Euro Effies 2005, 2006 & 2007
The Johnson Building
77 Hatton Garden
London
EC1N 8JS
Direct Tel: +44 (0) 203 037 3815
Switchboard: +44 (0) 203 037 3000

P Please do not print this email unless you really need to.

[tlarkin]

I think you should send me to Europe and I will recon those machines for you, and don't worry I am worth every penny :)

OK, but on a serious note, the jamf binary does not really send large amounts of network traffic. When we were deploying our 6,000 Macs last year I think we maybe spiked at around 7MB/s of traffic over the WAN. That wasn't all going to the JSS either, a lot of it was going out to the Open Directory servers for home synchronizing and authentication.

In a perfect network set up, I would have means of putting an onsite JSS just in case of network failure by some ISP. Depending on how crucial your management is for your systems. If some European ISP goes out and kills internet traffic from main land Europe to the UK, then your machines won't be managed until that is back on. That is probably an unlikely scenario but lets just say I have personally experienced an outage where someone cut the wrong fiber cable, and managed to cut the back up cable as well. Thank you AT&T for that experience.

Also the amount of clients you will have checking in should be a factor as well. If you set your clients to check in, say once a day for inventory you will have a pretty accurate report and that will randomize the timing of clients checking in.

If you only have around 50 to 100 Macs I would say you are golden. How many Macs are we talking about? Also, do you plan on running Recon on the Windows machines as well?

---

Thomas Larkin
TIS Department
KCKPS USD500
tlarki at kckps.org
blackberry: 913-449-7589
office: 913-627-0351

[#6]

That is very helpful. We would only be deploying to Mac machines at present
and no where near the amount of macs you are dealing with. The largest
office probably has 100 so it is definitely under 300 ­ 500 macs. Glad to
hear about the sizing of the spikes on the WAN and I do not need to Recon
these machines daily for instance as we are really only wanting to ensure
software compliance so I figure I can actually try to circulate that load
over the month to the different office to get my data back to a central
point. For the bigger offices I could then put in a few distribution servers
which can then help me manage those offices better using more of the suite.

London it is which means less travel but I will see what I can do about that
ticket dude. ;0)

J