Lansweeper risks

[JonG]

I am a network admistrator of a large WAN with with varying degrees of bandwidth (approx 3500 Pcs). I have come across your product over the last couple of weeks and I must say that it looks impressive and very scalable. Just wondering if you had any answers to the following questions :-

- on average how long does it take to do a full scan of a PC and is there a finite limit in number of connecting PCs before it is recommended to have multiple central servers
- would it be bandwidth intensive on the network
- what are the risks or running this application. More specifically does it make any changes to the end PC at any time other than the configurable action scripts
- is the SQL table structure likely to change radically in the future. Investigating the possibility of using the product to link with a service desk system and conscious that recent updates have meant old versions were not upgradable.
- is there any roadmap for future releases

Apologies if this message comes across as a but negative, but I am just a little concerned about passing a domain admin account to any software that is then going to 'touch' potentially every machine in the network. Sure you have been asked this before and can see that it would be difficult to do without a domain admin account other than fiddling with WMI/REGEDIT/NTFS security and admin shares on a massive scale.

Many thanks

[JonG]

Thanks for the reply

I am aware that the lsclient only notifies the main server that the client is ready to be scanned but does the actual scan routine make any changes to the PC. Is it basically only reading WMI counters with no alteration to the machine files or registry in any way ?

Also, looking at your demo site I cannot see any length of time it takes to scan the PC on the action screen, is this time stamp just the last time it was connected too rather than the length of time it took to scan.

Many thanks

[Hemoco]

JonG wrote:
I am aware that the lsclient only notifies the main server that the client is ready to be scanned but does the actual scan routine make any changes to the PC. Is it basically only reading WMI counters with no alteration to the machine files or registry in any way ?

The service doens't change anything on the clients, it only reads WMI,registry,file data

JonG wrote:
Also, looking at your demo site I cannot see any length of time it takes to scan the PC on the action screen, is this time stamp just the last time it was connected too rather than the length of time it took to scan.

The demo site is a bad example, the data for this is mostly removed or altered.

[Hemoco]

A loginscript (batch file is indeed better)
Some services log on/off constantly which trigger the gpo

- on average how long does it take to do a full scan of a PC and is there a finite limit in number of connecting PCs before it is recommended to have multiple central servers

You can see the timing of a pc in the action screen (in seconds)
The service works with a queing system (simultaneous scans)
if you have 10 simultaneous scans and 100 computers report in at the same time, the 11th computer waits in the queue until the first one is finished.

- would it be bandwidth intensive on the network

In the past I managed to get it to work over a 128 kbit Wan.

- what are the risks or running this application. More specifically does it make any changes to the end PC at any time other than the configurable action scripts

No changes are made, the only thing lsclient does is sending a message to the service "hello I'm here, please scan me"

- is the SQL table structure likely to change radically in the future. Investigating the possibility of using the product to link with a service desk system and conscious that recent updates have meant old versions were not upgradable.

The database scructure is closely linked to the WMI structure of microsoft, so it won't change much.

- is there any roadmap for future releases

The wishlist is used for this (a service desk system is also on the wish list)
Since the product is relatively new (not taking into account versions below 2.0) the community can still grow quite a lot.

[sbartley]

I have been useing lan sweeper on a WAN for a large company 450 pc the scan can slow the pc down a lot when i added it to the startup script in GPO so i had to create the bat file below to scan once then if i need to force a scan i push the command useing psexec

@@ECHO OFF
IF EXIST C:\CLIENT.TXT GOTO SKIP
\\server\netlogon\LSclient.exe server
COPY \\server\NETLOGON\client.txt c:\
GOTO END
:SKIP
ECHO "CLIENT ALREADY INSTALLED"
GOTO END2
:END
ECHO "CLIENT INSTALLED"
:END2