Reviews for LanSweeper

[estebs1978]

Good afternoon and greetings from Dallas, Texas!

We currently use Altiris and this is a great management tool for imaging and doing a few more things that Altiris can do.

We have been tasked to do an inventory of all of our servers in the non production and production environment (roughly 750 servers).

We do not want to install a client on those servers as they are heavily used; all of them every day all day long due to the nature of our business.

We ran into LandSweeper but I am having a hard time finding reviews on it. I realize that here I will most likely get great reviews either from the sales team of LandSweeper, tech support, or very happy users. 🙂

Besides this forum, is there another resource for reviews? A few questions:

1. What do you guys think about this product? We can only use the free version. We think it would take an act of congress to buy the product.

2. Would this product handle 750 servers?

3. Privacy. The nature of our business is clasified and very sensitive data runs on a lot of our servers. Does Land Sweeper get any of this information?

4. I understand that the product uses no agent on the servers?

5. Security. Will LandSweeper work within our network and will it need for our firewalls to be opened/port scanning, etc.?

Please let me know if I am missing something and your comments are valuable to me.

Regards,

[estebs1978]

I have already disabled Windows Firewall through GPO because of Altiris and the fact that we have a million firewalls and the Windows firewall truly is useless.

Thanks for the info though!

[Cobra7]

estebs1978 wrote:
A few questions:

1. What do you guys think about this product? We can only use the free version. We think it would take an act of congress to buy the product.

I use GSS 2.5 and know how that inventory works and guess Alritis works close to the same way. Myself I like Lansweeper better for inventory. You can make due with the free version just fine.

estebs1978 wrote:


2. Would this product handle 750 servers?

Easily, my company is running over 1300 servers and PC's just fine.

estebs1978 wrote:


3. Privacy. The nature of our business is clasified and very sensitive data runs on a lot of our servers. Does Land Sweeper get any of this information?

The closest I would say it can gather is if YOU tell it to scan for a file or a registry key, and even then it only reports back if it is there or not. In the end, no.

estebs1978 wrote:


4. I understand that the product uses no agent on the servers?

Correct

estebs1978 wrote:


5. Security. Will LandSweeper work within our network and will it need for our firewalls to be opened/port scanning, etc.?

Software firewalls are a pain, you can use group policies to let it past though.

estebs1978 wrote:


Please let me know if I am missing something and your comments are valuable to me.

Regards,

[taeratrin]

It's a per-company license agreement, so the number of systems scanned makes no difference as long as they're all considered to be owned by one company. There is no demo/trial of the premium package as far as I know (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, LS).

[Hemoco]

Here are some reviews:

http://redmondmag.com/columns/article.asp?editorialsid=2801


http://www.geekstogo.com/2008/10/27/lansweeper-product-review/

http://www.petri.co.il/monitoring-your-network-with-lansweeper.htm

[estebs1978]

Thank you so much for the reply. I will pass this along to my superiors.

Do you have to have a premium copy for every server you use this on or just one premium copy (the $149) for all servers?

Can you get a full blown demo version to test?

Regards,

[taeratrin]

1) It's pretty decent. I picked it over the reset for a large list of reasons, not least of which are the customizable 'actions'

2) Yes

3) It only scans WMI and registry information. There is a file-scan feature in it, but it will only pick up various attributes of the specified files (path, version, last modified, size, etc.)

4) Technically, there is no agent, but there is a program that must be run on the machine that runs for about one second (basically just tells the server "I'm here, scan me"). The recommended way for workstations is to add it to the user's login scripts via GPO. For servers, though, this may not be the best option. You could try my deployment tool (found in the 'Custom Actions' area of this forum), but you should probably wait until I get the next version released.

5) From what I've read, it only really has a problem with Windows Firewall. We disable that on our systems, so I've never had to deal with it. Our hardware firewalls let it pass through without configuration. This is going to depend on your environment.