Sigh.
I keep getting other priorities. Sorry to anyone who is waiting.
I’ll post a mindmap of where I am soon – problem is that there are still a lot of questions that I need to get answered on this.
My main pain right now is getting SLES 9 support packs cleanly into ZLM7 – this is driven by a customer request. My other pain is some of the internal workings of ZLM and how to best document that.
Thanks for your continued patience.
Wow. There has been a flurry of activity with ZENworks Server Management in the last month or so.
Martin Irwin in WorldWide Support built a set of CPKs to deploy ZENworks 6.5 SP2 across your infrastructure; he is now working on delivering this with the standalone CPK engine (think of this as a small part of the ZENworks Server Management subscriber agent) to all customers. That is way cool.
Peter Lambrechtsen in New Zealand has almost finalised a CPK (hopefully soon with the standalone engine) that will let you deploy ZENworks 7 in your network.
All very cool – and showing real savings for customers deploying ZENworks in an enterprise.
Centralised deployment, across hundreds of servers – in hours. Now that’s value.
Did you know you can use the imaging in ZLM7 to image Linux and Windows?
Nice solution for a standalone imaging solution if you just want a nearly-smart(*) imaging story. It’s fast, furious and does what I need.
(*) for true smartness use ZENworks 7 with the full policy enablement of imaging.
ZENworks OS imaging has always been based on the Linux kernel – it’s fast, efficient, has a great networking stack and is also extensible. None of the problems of DOS and getting NDIS drivers etc.
Earlier versions of ZENworks – (ZfD 3.x, ZfD 4.0, ZENworks 6, ZENworks 6.5) – spawned a slew of sites dedicated to tweaking this Linux environment. Notable is the Novell Forge Project zfdimgdrv. The imaging environment has also been extended by the likes of ENGL.
ZENworks 7 changed to a SLES 9 SP2-based kernel; this provides extensive hardware support (and real support; things that have been tested).
For unsupported hardware – or to add updated drivers – life is now a lot simpler.
Matt Misbach – one of the ZENworks engineers – passed on this tip:
As mentioned I’m working on a best practices guide for ZLM7.
I’m writing a discussion of the package universe concept; how it differs from previous versions of ZLM (ZLM 6.x and RCE) and some design recommendations.
I also wrote a nifty script to populate the package universe 🙂 I’ll share that when I’ve tested it to death – but here’s the output:
Right now I can build all of my package universe as well as SP2 updates for SLES 9 and NLD 9. It takes about 20 minutes and minimal prep work.
(more…)
I started zlmirror running last night – on my live server.
It ate all my bandwidth 🙂
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