Title:
Executive Software’s Sitekeeper
by Robert
Sanborn One
of the problems that nearly all businesses have to face, or should have
to, is the tracking of the hardware and software that are on the
computers. With just a couple of computers to manage, it can become a no
big deal issue with you but if you track more than a few, have trouble
remembering what is on what computer, and worse yet, what vintage of
software each one is running, it becomes more of a real chore. I do it
manually, I create a spreadsheet like table to track what is on what
computer and have to remind myself every once in a while, to go do a
survey of the computers and see what has changed. And when something
changes, I need to dig out the spreadsheet and update it. But you know,
when adding and removing software on my test system, it becomes
difficult to keep it up to date or if I just bring in a product or
change a video card, it gets out of date quite easily. So I asked if
there was a better way and what I found was Sitekeeper from Executive
Software. Its name tells it all, it is a tool to keep track of what is
on your site.
Installation is
pretty easy even for such a complicated job as this. The software starts
up like most any other but it really keeps track of what it is doing and
if you need components, gives you the option of pausing the install to
load them. For instance, it prefers to use Microsoft’s SQL Database to
house its files and information that you will be building but if it
doesn’t’ find it on your computer, it will load a subset program to take
care of things. You can allow it as much openness or security as you
want but in my testing of the program, I just let it take the usual
defaults and it installed easily. What I really like is the wizard
process that they use to take you through the installation steps. Where
I have, first run into problems is after setting up the program, you
need to run the Agent install process on computers that are not Windows
XP Pro systems. I told Sitekeeper where to put the files and
immediately, it would not allow any of the other computers on the
network to get them. It appears that Sitekeeper turned off particular
sharing for that folder so what I needed to do was to turn it on for the
folder. This was despite that the folder that the files were in was in a
shared folder and that I could get to any of the other files in that
main folder. Once that was figured out, running the agent on the non-WinXP
system was an easy install.
Once installed,
things began to bog down but to be honest, I am not sure that I should
point the blame at the product. First, remember that this program
prefers to work in a Domain type of network environment that uses a
server to keep track of everything from documents to users and passwords
and the authorizations to let people use particular machines. My testing
was done on a peer-to-peer network of computers that had only one
machine running a server quality package, Windows XP Pro, while the
others ran Windows XP Home and Windows98. So the first time I tell
Sitekeeper to look at the computers on the network, it refused saying
that I did not give it permission. In a peer network, who cares about
permissions? Well, actually I do because I am on a broadband network as
well so I am pretty picky about what gets to each of my machines. So I
run things like a hardware based firewall router and Zone Alarm on each
of the computers. So the question, was it the Zone Alarm causing the
problem, the firewall, or what.
The problem was
the permissions that I needed to set up on each system. In Sitekeeper,
you go to the manage permissions section and set up a common user with a
password that each computer needs to set up to allow the Sitekeeper
software to go into each machine and run the software. For the Windows
XP systems, I needed to add the user and password with administrative
privileges to each computer. Once that was done, Sitekeeper was able to
scan each computer on the network just fine. As for the Windows98
system, once the agent was loaded and run, Sitekeeper got to it directly
with out any problems.
Now that the administrative hassles and difficulties
are out of the way, it was time to take a good look at what it can do
and tell me about my computers. What strikes me first is that how fast
it scans your systems and network. The report is back before I get out
of the chair. Granted there isn’t much on the laptop but the test system
and my main system are loaded with hardware and software and Sitekeeper
gets it quickly. What you first notice is that it gives you everything.
The software inventory lists every program that is on each system and
while it does a good job of pulling them out and listing them for you,
there are a lot that will appear in the “unavailable” Publisher
category. In those cases, rather than listing the program application,
it lists the individual program files it finds, in my case, a seven-page
report of 331 programs. The good news is that you can tell it to hide
those that you don’t really need to care about, like “mouse.com” for
instance, and focus in on the program that can cause you problems. As a
for instance, in looking over my report, I see that on each computer, I
am running a different version of “Microsoft Streets and Trips”. This
can be really important to you if you are trying to be both the
administrator and help desk person for this network. If a user calls you
with a problem, it sure would help to know right away what version that
they have.
Where things can be a bit time consuming is the
licensing tracking module in Sitekeeper. Again, they have a wizard that
will take you through the steps of monitoring your licenses but it will
be time consuming, as you need to gather the information and make sure
you have them. The good news about the process is that you can start and
stop at any point as it only takes just a few seconds to rescan the
network on my systems. However, once you have finished this process, it
really makes the job of managing what is on the network much easier. As
with the other reports, you can remove some of the items that don’t need
listing or tracking.
The hardware scan is an interesting report. What I
like about all these reports is that you can save them in an html format
for viewing on other systems, and you can change the sorting order to
look at devices, computers, and systems. I do wish that the reports
actually included more detail such as drivers, and maybe even a
reference to the registry entries that the searched. When I look at the
device listing though, it seems that it pulls the name from each system
and they might not be standardized. For example, the CD Rom drives are
all called “CDROM” and I see all five of them. The problem is that there
aren’t five but Sitekeeper thinks that the ThinkPad (Notebook) has two,
one from Teac and one from LG. In another example, under device “fdc”, I
show floppy controllers for each machine except for the notebook, and
under “Floppy Disk”, I show drives for all three machines including an
extra on the test system, which is not there. I looked even more and
found several other discrepancies like that and further research shows
that I do indeed have some ghost pieces of hardware in the registry on
my notebook. Two drives it found there that don’t exist can be traced to
a digital camera I once had installed, and a USB Drive I once used and
both of these are still in the registry of the computer. Could these
ghosts cause hardware problems? Hard telling but it is interesting to
know that Sitekeeper finds them out for me and with a printed report
handy, you can keep it to remind you later when problems occur on that
particular machine.
A final piece of the package is the “Pushinstaller”
that allows you to add and remove packages from a central location on
your network. Like the other modules, it has a wizard that takes you
through the steps you need to install the programs and like the other
wizards, you need to be careful as you read the instructions as they are
different from the usual wizards you find in most installation programs
in that you just hit enter to get you through them and can always rely
on the defaults. With Executive Software’s Sitekeeper wizards, you
really need to pay attention to what is going on. With the pushinstaller,
the first thing I tried to do was to uninstall a program that was an
older version. I had mentioned that Microsoft Streets and Trips had
three different versions on my computers and so I thought, let me
uninstall the older ones and install the newer one to the other two
computers. So from the administrator system (which is my test system),
I told it to uninstall it from the laptop. It appears from where I was
sitting that it uninstalled just fine and the report at the end said it
was successful. This is one place where it would be nice if some of the
reports gave you a little more information as to what happens. When I
went over to the laptop to see what happened, what I found was that
Streets and Trips was running. It seems that the pushinstaller had
actually launched the program itself. What was confusing to me, besides
this, was that as I went through the wizard, it asked for the location
of the setup program to Streets on the laptop. Since it wasn’t there, I
pointed it to the actual Streets program itself. Obviously, that was the
wrong thing to do. Back to the instructions and to try again and it
seems that after some trial and error, how you do this is not that
straightforward for typical desktop applications. You need to specify
command line parameters that are not that intuitive to figure out and
you need to have the files to be downloaded installed on a shared
component on the computer. In my trial again to bring my Streets
programs up to date, it still gave me difficulties but did finally start
the installation on the test system. However, as I probably didn’t set
it up correctly not knowing what command line parameters to use, it
required me to step it through the installation of the program. At least
I got it installed. The more I dig into the details, the more that I see
that it is probably Streets that doesn’t allow for unattended
installation, which is what the command line parameters are looking for.
In my example with Streets, in browsing around, I decided to try the
command line parameter /qn. I had found this on a number of other
applications listed and so gave it a try. The first time I ran it,
Sitekeeper’s Pushinstaller report tells me that it installed just fine.
And in fact, when looking at the laptop, I could see it downloading
something across the network from the test system. After a while, it
comes up with a message saying it was trying to reboot itself but there
was a user still connected, do I want to shut down. So why not. What
happened was that as soon as it rebooted, I could find no trace of
Streets on the system. So what did it download? When I searched the
system, I found download text files in the Windows Temp folder and it
appears that it need to update something on the computer before it could
download the program. So back again at my test system, the master
console for Sitekeeper, I told it again to install Streets on the laptop
and this time, it sailed on through without any problems using that
command line parameter /qn, it asked no questions and when I went back
later to look at the laptop, found the Streets loaded just fine.
My inclination here is to believe that I was loading
software that was never intended to be handled this way but thought that
it would be a good test of the program and I am very satisfied with how
it worked out. I was also loading a program that sits on two CDs and
forced it to be installed from a folder rather than from the CD rom
drives which you would normally do in this situation.
What I like about Sitekeeper is the ease of the
wizards to help you finish installing the product. You do need to check
the documentation and should read it before installing it as it might
save you some of the problems that I ran into. Of course, I probably
would have known some of these things had I been more in tune with
server based networking but dealing with a program that has its roots in
server based networking is something I just don’t deal with much. But
once I got it rolling, found it to be very useful even in my limited
network of three machines. I was able to scan each system, see what they
have, what they needed, and install programs across the network to each
one. For people and companies that need a good solid way of tracking
this kind of information, Sitekeeper can’t be beat and I do like the way
it works. Pricing for Sitekeeper is around $349 for a ten-machine
license.
--------------------------------------
Robert Sanborn is
an Independent Personal Computer Consultant and a contributing editor
for the Indy PC News. Reach him through the net at indypcnews@indy.rr.com
|
