Tweaking an Altiris Package?

[AngelicKnight]

And yes, I've already googled. :P

As of three weeks ago I had never heard of Altiris much less worked with it, so since I started the new job it's been a bit of a crash course. Are any of you guys familiar with it?

Basically, this is what I'm trying to figure out -- We have a package in our Altiris deployment that installs 7-zip onto each client machine. That's working great and all, but we want to adjust it so that by default the program creates *.zip instead of *.7z files. All I've done in Altiris so far is run a deployment job, so I don't know a thing about creating or modifying an install package. Given that there are full certification courses for this program, I fear I have a long road ahead.

Do any of you have any knowledge/resources I can tap into to kind of (begin) to learn my way through this?

[oofki]

Altiris is a company that was aquired by symantec if i am correct. What product/version that you are using?

[nihil]

Hi,

Never used it, but as far as I know Altiris is a management/deployment tool, and I have used plenty of those.

You have two tasks as I see things:

1. Bone up on Altiris and find out how to create or modify deployment packages. Modify generally means delete & replace.

2. Figure out how to get a file compression utility that is based on a new file type (.7z) to output into a format that is claimed to be 35~50% less efficient than its native format.

You can probably get it to "save as" on a manual basis.......... I can't check that as I don't have it on this machine, but to use an alien format as default? that might not be an option.

7-zip is an open source product, so you could get the source and amend that............ but why would you want to?

I guess that you want to send compressed files to people who use applications that don't support the .7z format? Well the answer is to educate your users to learn how to open a zip file/archive and use the "save as" that I am pretty sure must be there.

Otherwise, if you really want to use .zip files, get an application that supports that output format as a default.

I have ALZip on this box (the free version) I just went into the tools/options bit and under "associations" I found that I could change the default output to .zip rather than the .alz format. I have just tested it on Win XP SP2 and it works

Your first task is to find out how to get your compression utility to default to what you want, then just create a new package to distribute it. You will probably have to add a script to your deployment package that will automatically open the application once installed, and change the options if they are there.

I have just downloaded 7-zip (4.42: 14th May 2006) and I can manually save a .zip file, but I cannot find an option to default that setting. I will now look at the latest (beta) version.



EDIT:

The beta (4.56: 24 October 2007) does support defaulting to this setting, but I wouldn't even think of rolling out a beta anything to users

Incidentally, I went to the official website and those were the only two versions available.

[AngelicKnight]

Sorry -- It's specifically Altiris Deployment Manager.

Supposedly 7zip usually defaults to creating zip archives in *.7z format, but you can change that default manually to *.zip. I'm assuming that you can tweak that in an options menu or during setup as opposed to messing with its actual code. So the idea is to set up the remote install package so that it automatically changes that default to *.zip accordingly.

So the problem for me is I'm coming in on something someone else configured. Since I'm the "new guy" and worse yet, new to the deployment software, I'm messing around with an already configured, scripted package trying to figure out how it was put together and then how to change it. And as I discovered, this relies heavily on scripting, particularly running some vb scripts, which falls well outside my skill set. Guess no better time than the present to learn then huh?

In any case, doesn't look like this one's gonna be a simple solution from what I've researched so far today -- I'm going to have to learn my way in and around the software first before I have a hope of figuring out how to make minor nit-picky tweaks of that nature.

My hopes of finding a fast cheap way of learning how to do it has met abrupt failure.

[nihil]

Hi, let's go through the logical steps.

1. You have a deployment package...........all it does is deploy software. It will have a capability to default questions that the software asks, and also any reboots. The software doesn't prompt for any of its settings on installation (other than location/access path)

2. What it won't do is open software and alter optional configuration settings. It will launch a script, but you will have to write it.

3. It certainly won't alter settings that are not available in the software, which was the case with the first version I tested (4.42).

4. You have a beta release that is only 4 weeks old. This does support the required functionality but as a beta is an unknown quantity.

So, what do you do?

1. Learn how to use the deployment software and write scripts to incorporate in it.

2. Start testing the Beta in your environment.

3. Be patient

Good luck!