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Altiris eXpress/LabExpert is a systems management solution. It consists of a client that runs on each managed machine, which connect by direct TCP/IP or IP Multicasting to central Servers connected to a SQL Server (currently MS SQL 7) to store detailed info on every client and also find out any events (software or instructions) that are to be sent to the clients. The other side is a windows based console that allows full control over each client and software packages, and allows grouping of both. Scheduling is also supported.
My main complaint with the system is that the client does not provide any access modes other than full control - we wanted to allow the help desk staff to have access to HW inventory and installed software, but not allow them to change anything. The other problem is because of the constantly updated nature of the database the client is constantly issuing a multitude of SQL queries that make it lag slightly navigating around, and all the features make it a bit to heavy to open up for quick little inventory checks. The solution was to make a web based interface.
The servers at work are NT based and the one with IIS installed also had ActivePerl so I installed the DBI module and ODBC DBD and went crazy. I discovered a few glitches with the back end that sorta surprised me - I kept getting random memory access violations when dumping many rows from a query onto the web output. This really surprised me because perl doesn't give you the same ability to abuse memory that other languages such as C will give you. I found the problem is somewhere between the DBI interface and the database, and since I didn't feel like debugging ODBC my current solution is to sleep for a second every 10 rows. I haven't had many problems at all since doing this.
For now I have screen shots, but maybe once I get all the bugs worked out I'll post the code too (I started on Tuesday 2/20 and it's now 2/24).
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