[Casper] Recon Rollout Question

[Thomas Larkin]

I think you should send me to Europe and I will recon those machines for you, and don't worry I am worth every penny :) 

OK, but on a serious note, the jamf binary does not really send large amounts of network traffic.  When we were deploying our 6,000 Macs last year I think we maybe spiked at around 7MB/s of traffic over the WAN.  That wasn't all going to the JSS either, a lot of it was going out to the Open Directory servers for home synchronizing and authentication. 

In a perfect network set up, I would have means of putting an onsite JSS just in case of network failure by some ISP.  Depending on how crucial your management is for your systems.  If some European ISP goes out and kills internet traffic from main land Europe to the UK, then your machines won't be managed until that is back on.  That is probably an unlikely scenario but lets just say I have personally experienced an outage where someone cut the wrong fiber cable, and managed to cut the back up cable as well.  Thank you AT&T for that experience. 

Also the amount of clients you will have checking in should be a factor as well.  If you set your clients to check in, say once a day for inventory you will have a pretty accurate report and that will randomize the timing of clients checking in.   

If you only have around 50 to 100 Macs I would say you are golden.  How many Macs are we talking about?  Also, do you plan on running Recon on the Windows machines as well?


___________________________
Thomas Larkin
TIS Department
KCKPS USD500
tlarki at kckps.org
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>>> "Burnett, James (GCG IT)" <james.burnett at greyeu.com> 09/16/08 7:07 AM >>>

Hello everyone

We are currently running Casper 6 sucessfully in our local office LAN and want to rollout (in particular Recon) to our other offices in Western Europe. Many of these are on slower links and do not have a large infrastructure and certainly do not have OSX server. Other offices are larger and have around 50 to 100 macs and a better osx backend and links. We are trying to find a solution that best fits moving forward and planning the best way to implement Recon to start. Essentially we need to run recon on all of the macs in WEU to report on software licensing.

Question is: do people think it is a good idea to use a centrally managed server from London and have them reporting back to our server or is it best to go with asking the offices to install a local copy of osx server and run their own versions? Ideally we would like to maintain control of the data and be able to access (which I know you can do either way over http). Ideally we would like to have a good booster server setup in the future that we could share our applications, etc but at present that is not our main goal.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

James




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