Network / Systems Management tools

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This is primarilly for those who work in schools / college's who have a real need to lock down their systems from interfering users, but could apply to anyone.

I'm just wondering what network / systems management software you use, and how you find it?

In my school we use Ranger for our security policies, monitoring, etc. This is primarily because I worked for a reseller and was familliar with it.

I know that there are others out there (RM, etc) but how do you find the ones that you use? Would you feel comfortable using a pure MS environment locked down with GPO's?

 

The company I work for uses Ranger in high schools and we quite like it as a product. Certainly offers a great deal more than just using GPO's by themselves.

We also use a product called Winsuite for most of the primary schools that we support. Similar in principal to Ranger but no were near as powerful, but it's more than enough for most Primary School networks.

I try and avoid RM software and systems if I can (ie Classmate XP, Connect 3 etc...) but sometimes I don't get to choose what my schools decided to go with before they had the company I work for supporting them.

I work in 9 different schools a week, doing half a day in each, mostly Primary. Will be moving on soon though to work with the erstwhile WagnerK at a high school. Much more interesting systems and problems to tackle.

 

Why not just learn (for windows networks obviously) how group policy works...it is such a powerful tool.

Take a look here:
http://wm.quest.com/landing/?id=88&adCode=Int-GoogleAdTextActiveDirectoryBulletProof09202005

there is also an excel file of (most of) the group policy settings.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...2f-da15-438d-8e48-45915cd2bc14&displaylang=en

to give you some idea of the number available it is a 4Mb file or plain text!

 

Group Policy is a very powerful tool, but it doesn't always offer what is needed interms of monitoring ability in an environment such as a school. Hence why third party tools are used.

For instance using Ranger I can capture users screens when the comit a security violation, and I can set the system up to do this in about three clicks of the mouse.

 

How do you know they have committed a security violation Simon. Do you get real time alerts? Can you monitor what the little buggers are up to in real time?

Sounds to me like Ranger is a good solution for schools.

 

What Simon said really. Ranger is a great system and offers way way more than what you can do with group policy. As another example, it has a sophostcated title and exe checking system that can stop people in their tracks trying to run things that are restricted. It can even stop people typing in UNC paths etc.. It brings it all together in a nice managed envoironment and makes keeping an eye on the buggers much easier.

It has a great deal of depth and I'm sure you could (given enough time) implement most of it's functionality via group poilcy, but it would be a big project, take up allot of time and resources and still would be as easy to manage or be as truly effective.

 

You sure do, and can!

For me Ranger is the Dogs B******s! And like Modey said Most things could be done via GPO's but it would take ages!