Public Access Implementation - Sales Case Study

Below is a summary of the Public Access Computer Suite (PAC) which provides secure and protected access to council services through Library and Community Learning facilities. This is achieved through:

• 1. Centralised server deployment - i.e. servers are in a secure central site
• 2. Deployment of Management PCs to the local site - These act as file and package stores as well as Wake on LAN and multicast proxies. No local authentication or service information is hosted on the management PCs. Allocation of local file stores for image and package use is handled according to IP range automatically by the Altiris Deployment and Client Management servers so WAN bandwidth usage is kept to a minimum.
• 3. Deployment of Faronics Deepfreeze to all clients - Deepfreeze prevents the contamination of any desktop by storing the desired state of the PC locally allowing the PC to be reset to its original state on reboot. This allows the PC to be cleared of any software, files or viruses downloaded onto the PC on reboot. Depending on the requirements, the PC can be set to reboot nightly, on logoff or if it is idle for a set length of time. Deepfreeze is controlled centrally from a web console.
• 4. Site Security - Intersite communications is provided by a number of firewalls throughout the network. The management of the firewall rules is made simpler by the centralisation of the AD authentication and services traffic. In addition the usual latency issues with GPO across the WAN are much less of a concern due to the deployment of Deepfreeze and Altiris CMS. Patching is achieved through the CMS rather than WSUS/SMS so the impact of any WSUS GPO structure on AD and GPO structure is lessened considerably.

The PAC infrastructure is shown:

A more detailed services map is shown below:

Additional services include but are not limited to:

Self Service Software Portal - This allows controlled software to be installed on demand and metered accordingly. Licences are handled by the Altiris CMS suite. This functionality is of particular value to the Community Learning & Development part of the public access suite, as it allows particular courses to be deployed on demand.

Carbon Copy - This allows the remote management of the client PCs with remote desktop, speech, and FTP utilities.

Inventory - PC inventory and reporting is achieved through the Altiris Client. This allows an instant view of the installed hardware, software and usage according to the desired form. The inventory function also determines the requirements for patch management automatically.

Compliance Monitoring - This CMS level provides AD security and patch compliance monitoring.

Software Management

The successful management of an enterprise is largely dependent on the consistency of the information used throughout that enterprise. To this end all software packages, scripts and images are kept in a single master instance on the PACSTORE server.  On demand replication jobs are configured to copy the master images and software to the local repositories on a designated schedule when a package is updated.   

The software and imaging management is shown below:    

Patch Management

Altiris ensures the consistency of the overall patching infrastructure by automatically deploying patches and updates through the use of the Altiris client. A central file repository is used as a master file store for all software. CMS jobs, software and images used throughout the infrastructure will use PACSTORE as a reference. Actual software used during the job will most likely be sourced from the local management PC but it will be consistent with that on PACSTORE. Software patching can also be done this way depending on preferred deployment method and software type. For instance a service pack update (or similarly a Deepfreeze update) would probably be handled by a normal software deployment job instead of a full CMS managed installation.

mORE information

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