home

Software deployment that makes sense
by Floydman


Bachelor in Computer Sciences
Floydian_99@yahoo.com
September 21st, 2000

You can distribute this document freely, as long as no changes are made to the file, or as long as someone else does not pretend credit for it. All comments and suggestions about the material presented here should be directed at floydian_99@yahoo.com. If future versions of this document include add-ons coming from other people than me, then proper credit to the various authors will be clearly identified. All version updates of this document are to be released by me.

You can find it online at http://www.oocities.org/floydian_99/

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to present a simple and efficient way to do software deployment in a Windows environment network. I also discuss, as a background reference, my previous experiences on that field during my previous jobs.

Preface

While doing my research this summer, I found a nice program that I immediately fell in love with. Better yet, it had a twin sister even more attractive. These programs are InstallWatch and InstallRite, available at www.epsilonsquared.com. In my paper "A poor man Tripwire-like system on Windows 9x/NT", I described how to use InstallWatch/InstallRite (identified as InstallRite from hereon) to have a setup similar to a basic Tripwire system (www.tripwire.com), and another paper, "Computer snooping using InstallRite", covering on how it could be used to collect information on computer usage. This paper, the third in what I now call the "InstallRite series", is probably the one the most awaited for by it's author, Gavin Stark from Epsilon Squared: it will cover the use of InstallRite with its initial intent and purpose, to monitor software installation and the benefits that comes from it (read $$$).

Targeted audience

This document is presented to anyone who has interests in computer support, NT administration, software deployment, configuration management and computing in general.

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. The good...
3. The bad...
4. And the ugly
5. InstallRite
6. The experiment
7. In conclusion

Download whole text file here

Home