Forcing agent to connect

[m1kew1lson]

In our company 60% of our workforce is mobile users, who everyday or so connect via dialup or vpn to check email and get some files etc and then disconnect.

We have the agent set to check for updates everyhour, but the EPO server is not available on the internet, it is behind our firewall....is there a way to force the agent to do an update upon establishing a connection, other than using logon scripts?

Anyone have comments on security within EPO and hazards vs advantages of placing it in a dmz?

 

[qtin]

Why not just have a fallback repository of NAIFtp or NAIHttp? I would rather have this setup (which I do) than my ePo server in my DMZ.

You might want to check this out. I think it is set by default to hit a NAI server. Look on at the policies of your agent.

HTH

Q-

 

[jbrackett]

For your laptop users, you can set a secondary AutoUpdate task in ePO and schedule it to "Run On Dialup". Assuming you leave NAIftp or NAIhttp as a fallback repository, and that you are checking for available repositories via ping response, your users would immediately ping repositories, get no response from your master repository (since it is behind your firewall), and upon getting a ping response from NAI would check for updates there.

[sub]"The Crystal Wind is the storm, and the storm is data, and the data is life. You have been slaves, denied the storm, denied the freedom of your data. That is now ended; the whirlwind is upon you . . . . . . Whether you like it or not."[/sub]

[sup]"Trent the Uncatchable" in The Long Run by Daniel Keys Moran[/sup]

 

[m1kew1lson]

I was actually thinking that in the near future with VS 8 having more control over the firewall/security features, and those features being set correctly is just as important often as correct DAT versions are.

We do currently use the NAI servers as failbacks.

 

[bfralia]

The client update tasks are resident on the client computer. If it's flagged run missed job, it will run on startup. Of course, the client may not be dialed in at that time. As jbrackett mentions above, you can also set up the secondary task to run on dialup. I haven't found this necessary so far.

My client update task is set to run every hour, use ping time to establish repository. The sitelist.xml includes NAIHTTP as an update site. If they are dialed in when the job runs, it will check for updates at NAIHTTP even if the client isn't connected to the VPN.

All my traveling laptops are set this way and appear to be updating as hoped for.