A few questions regarding WAN Agents
Hi there,
We've been using DC now for about a year, but I keep running into an issue with our WAN agents.
Information about our network might help... We are a construction company. Our network is a bit of a piece meal of technology at the moment, the IT department is only about 4 or 5 years old, and in that time there has been some major rapid growth of the company as it acquires other companies and expands. We are across 8
Any computer system that is within our VLAN or is at a remote branch that has a distribution server seems to work just fine.
We have around 1000 systems in our company, 1/4 of those are desktops that are permanently located in the branch offices. 1/4 of them are desktops that are located at job sites using public internet and are not connected via our VLAN at all (and using off the shelf routers at the moment until we can get everything standardized). The other 1/2 of the systems are Laptops that go from branch to branch, and from jobsite to jobsite, as well as home with the user. So sometimes these units will be on our local VLAN, other times they will be on a public network.
Currently, we have distribution centers at each branch office (connected via our VLAN, separated by subnet). The Laptops and the jobsite computers are setup with WAN agents (specific for each city, and separated as a jobsite agent or laptop agent for better control of inventory) talking back to our primary Desktop Central server.
The problem that we are having is that a number of the WAN agents are not talking back. The funny thing, is that it is not all WAN agents that are not able to communicate back, and to make it even more interesting, only some computers are affected in each of the agent "Scopes" for the WAN agents - except one - where about 90% of them are not able to interact, and to make that even funnier, it's configured exactly the same way as all the other agent scopes.
I've been bashing my head on this one for quite awhile trying to determine why it is that this is happening or what the route cause is. Our firewall ports are opened properly. When agents are installed in the local office with one of the VLAN agents, it works fine. However, even if I switch that agent now to a WAN agent from within the network - heck the local office where the main server is, the agent all of a sudden stops interacting and is no longer reachable, and again, as mentioned before, this is quite random when it decides to work or not work.
So I need to figure out what is going on with this so that I can properly update systems. To make things even funnier, I have about 200 computers using our default agent that we install on all new systems (part of automated imaging process) that I can't move from scope to scope, can't RDP to, can't scan, yet it is able to receive updates lol
NB: The picture bellow shows the Scope of Management I have setup so you can understand when I say I have the systems separated by scope and city. The agent scope I can't move, rdp, scan, or interact at about 90% of the contained agents with is from the " _Test_ WAN Agent DC" and the "Local Office" scopes, and yet, they still get updated automatically. The TEST_WAN is what we based all the other WAN scopes on - we literally just copied the settings. For the TEST_WAN to stop working properly and so random where the others works (most of the time) baffles all of us in our IT department.
Okay that was problem number one that I absolutely need to solve like ASAP.
Now I have a question which hopefully has an easier answer. The IP Scope option. I was thinking of making use of this, primarily for those people with laptops who travel from branch to branch. This makes sense to me. However as those laptops leave our network and go onto public networks, I still need to be able to push updates to them. Is there any way for me to configure it to work properly like this? So that if it goes to someone's home, that I can still control and update as per normal (ie: Public and Private agent settings)?
Regards,
Senior Client Technology Support Analyst
Bird Construction Inc
http://www.bird.ca
http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/carlo-piva/31/267/a5b
We've been using DC now for about a year, but I keep running into an issue with our WAN agents.
Information about our network might help... We are a construction company. Our network is a bit of a piece meal of technology at the moment, the IT department is only about 4 or 5 years old, and in that time there has been some major rapid growth of the company as it acquires other companies and expands. We are across 8
Any computer system that is within our VLAN or is at a remote branch that has a distribution server seems to work just fine.
We have around 1000 systems in our company, 1/4 of those are desktops that are permanently located in the branch offices. 1/4 of them are desktops that are located at job sites using public internet and are not connected via our VLAN at all (and using off the shelf routers at the moment until we can get everything standardized). The other 1/2 of the systems are Laptops that go from branch to branch, and from jobsite to jobsite, as well as home with the user. So sometimes these units will be on our local VLAN, other times they will be on a public network.
Currently, we have distribution centers at each branch office (connected via our VLAN, separated by subnet). The Laptops and the jobsite computers are setup with WAN agents (specific for each city, and separated as a jobsite agent or laptop agent for better control of inventory) talking back to our primary Desktop Central server.
The problem that we are having is that a number of the WAN agents are not talking back. The funny thing, is that it is not all WAN agents that are not able to communicate back, and to make it even more interesting, only some computers are affected in each of the agent "Scopes" for the WAN agents - except one - where about 90% of them are not able to interact, and to make that even funnier, it's configured exactly the same way as all the other agent scopes.
I've been bashing my head on this one for quite awhile trying to determine why it is that this is happening or what the route cause is. Our firewall ports are opened properly. When agents are installed in the local office with one of the VLAN agents, it works fine. However, even if I switch that agent now to a WAN agent from within the network - heck the local office where the main server is, the agent all of a sudden stops interacting and is no longer reachable, and again, as mentioned before, this is quite random when it decides to work or not work.
So I need to figure out what is going on with this so that I can properly update systems. To make things even funnier, I have about 200 computers using our default agent that we install on all new systems (part of automated imaging process) that I can't move from scope to scope, can't RDP to, can't scan, yet it is able to receive updates lol
NB: The picture bellow shows the Scope of Management I have setup so you can understand when I say I have the systems separated by scope and city. The agent scope I can't move, rdp, scan, or interact at about 90% of the contained agents with is from the " _Test_ WAN Agent DC" and the "Local Office" scopes, and yet, they still get updated automatically. The TEST_WAN is what we based all the other WAN scopes on - we literally just copied the settings. For the TEST_WAN to stop working properly and so random where the others works (most of the time) baffles all of us in our IT department.
Okay that was problem number one that I absolutely need to solve like ASAP.
Now I have a question which hopefully has an easier answer. The IP Scope option. I was thinking of making use of this, primarily for those people with laptops who travel from branch to branch. This makes sense to me. However as those laptops leave our network and go onto public networks, I still need to be able to push updates to them. Is there any way for me to configure it to work properly like this? So that if it goes to someone's home, that I can still control and update as per normal (ie: Public and Private agent settings)?
Regards,
Senior Client Technology Support Analyst
Bird Construction Inc
http://www.bird.ca
http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/carlo-piva/31/267/a5b