A Powerful Server Manager

Ensuring maximum server uptime is one of the most

challenging tasks for any IT department. The LANDesk Server Manager is an

application just for this job. It can constantly monitor all servers in your

data center and provide details about their health in real time. It also

provides management capabilities such as remote deployment of



OSs



, patches and applications. It can automatically detect all devices present on

your network and sort them into categories like computers, printers,

infrastructure etc.

To start monitoring and managing servers, you need to

install client agents on each. For deploying patches and custom scripts to the

remote servers, LANDesk does this through a push client. The OS deployment (OSD)

feature provides PXE-based deployment to deploy OS images to devices on your

network. This allows you to deploy images on devices with empty hard drives or

unusable



OSs



. This can be very useful for initial provisioning of new devices or when

re-imaging a corrupt device. LANDesk Server Manager comes with an application

called Server Manager Dashboard, which does the real time monitoring of all

servers. The dashboard runs in a browser window and displays real-time

information about each server's current health status through live graphs.

While digging deeper into details, it shows you all real time processes and

services running on the system, hard disk space available, memory used, logs and

some other details.

LANDesk Server Manager also provides real time alerts to

administrators if a problem strikes. It can be configured to issue an alert

incase of hardware failure/change. It can notify users through e-mail or a web

page. It can also be configured to send an SNMP trap or to execute some program

on the server, which is showing alerts. Another useful thing in its monitoring

capabilities is Software License Monitoring. Server Manager can scan a system

for known and unknown applications running with detailed information about the

license purchase information.

LANDesk Server Manager also comes with vulnerability

scanning and patch management capabilities. It lets you automate the repetitive

processes of maintaining current vulnerability information, assessing

vulnerabilities for the various operating systems, downloading the appropriate

patch executable files, remediation vulnerabilities by deploying and installing

the necessary patches on affected devices, and verifying successful patch

installation. LANDesk comes with database of vulnerabilities which can be

automatically updated online from LANDesk's website.

With LANDesk Server Manager, you can view the health of all servers from anywhere on the network

Server Manager provides direct one-to-one patch remediation

for every vulnerability discovered on servers. The feature of vulnerability

remediation is only available for windows. However, vulnerability scanner can be

used for linux servers. LANDesk also has centralized log management. It combines

all logs into one for easy analysis. It also maintains a history of old logs for

keeping track of server performance and in turn provides predictive failure

detection.

It also has an inventory scanner to add devices to the core

database and to collect devices' hardware and software data. The inventory

scanner runs automatically when the device is initially configured. The scanner

collects hardware and software data and enters it into the core database. After

that, the hardware scan runs each time the device is booted, but the software

scan only runs at a configured interval. Server Manager includes a reporting

tool you can use to generate a wide variety of specialized reports that provide

critical information about the managed devices on your network. By default,

LANDesk has various formats of reports mainly divided into hardware, software

and other categories. One drawback you might find in configuring LANDesk is that

at some places it won't give you any information or show you an alert.

Using Server Manager



We've carried an evaluation copy of LANDesk Server Manager on this

month's PCQ Enterprise CD. Before you start installing LANDesk Server Manager

make sure that the core server on which you are installing it, is not a domain

controller and you have support for ASP.net and a web server installed. After

the installation is done, before you start using LANDesk Server Manager, you

need to activate the core server. For this, either you need to have LANDesk ID

and password or else you can activate a 45-day eval. Once the core server has

been activated, open the LANDesk Server Manager. First thing we need to do is to

find the available server and devices in your network. Click on Device discovery

tab, and click on new tab under discovery configurations. Here, you can choose

how you want to do device discovery and provide the IP address range and subnet

mask of the network. To schedule this discovery configuration, right click on it

and click on schedule. After the device discovery has finished you can see all

discovered devices under unmanaged devices divided in to various categories.

From the list, you can choose the devices you want to monitor or manage. To do

that, right click on the device and click on Target. Note that, if the device

doesn't have a name, you need to provide a name to it before targeting. This

name is only meant for LANDesk Manager, and it doesn't actually rename the

actual device. To put these devices into manage list, click on the manage tab

and choose the option Move targeted devices into my devices list and click on

move.

Now you need to install LANDesk Server Agent on the servers

you want to monitor. To do this, click on Agent configuration, and then click on

New tab to create a new agent configuration. Then provide a name for the

configuration. Select the Agent and click on Edit to customize its default

properties. You can select which agents should be installed on the remote

server, i.e. if you want to perform vulnerability scanning, monitoring, remote

control, etc. Choose options as per your needs and click on save changes and

click on Save As File option to save this agent as an executable package with

the filename same as the configuration name you specified. By default, the

package is saved in “C:\ProgramFiles\LANDesk\ManagementSuite\ldlogon\ConfigPackages”

folder on the core server. Now you need to run this executable file on the

remote server. Once executed this file will install the agents automatically.

Its vulnerability tool can scan servers on your network for vulnerabilities and automatically patch them

Once the agents are installed, we need to create the

monitoring rulesets to monitor these servers. For this, browse to monitoring and

create a new ruleset in the same earlier fashion. Once the ruleset is created,

click on it to edit the details. Here you can choose what things you want to

monitor in the server. For instance, if you want to monitor the free space on

your server's hard disk, then click on Drive space, and check Turn on

Monitoring for this item and give the time interval after which you want LANDesk

to check for it. You can also configure the Warning and critical threshold for

it. Similarly, you can create rulesets for Memory usage, Services, Drive failure

prediction, and various other things. Once the ruleset is created, click on

update and now to deploy this ruleset to the target devices click on Deploy

ruleset tab, choose which Monitoring ruleset you want to use and click on deploy

button.

To create a vulnerability scan task, go to the left

navigation pane, click Vulnerabilities before scanning update vulnerability

definitions. Clicking on the update and it will automatically update its

definitions from the Internet. If you wish, you can also schedule the

vulnerability and patch content update. Now, click on the scan button to make

sure the Scan group contains only those vulnerabilities that you want to scan.

If you want to remove any vulnerability from here, just right click on that

vulnerability and 'move to do not scan'. Click the Schedule security tasks

toolbar button. Provide a unique name for the scan. Next specify whether you

want the vulnerability scanner to display a progress dialog on the target

device. You can also specify whether you want a Cancel button to appear with the

scanner dialog, so that the end user has the option of canceling the scan.

Specify how you want the vulnerability scanner dialog to close when it is done

running on target devices. You can require end user input, or you can set the

dialog to close after a specified timeout period and click OK. Select the task

and set targeting and scheduling parameters, and click on Save. Similarly its

other functions can be used and configured



easily.

Swapnil Arora