HP has released a new version of their rapid deployment pack. It consists of Altiris DS 6.9 SP4, HP Firmware 9.00, Drivers and a lot of preconfigured jobs to install your servers with various OS’s. Their SmartStart scripting toolkit is included as well to automate iLO and SmartArray config.
http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/rdp/knowledgebase/20000060.html
For Dell servers there’s a similar package.
http://www.symantec.com/business/theme.jsp?themeid=deployment_solution_dell
HP also launched a version for Microsoft SCCM.
https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=HPICE-SC
The Altiris Beta program moved from http://beta.altiris.com to http://www.symantec.com/connect/ogproduct/endpoint-management-solutions-beta
The beta process has been moved to Symantec Connect, where we can take advantage of the existing community. As part of your beta experience, you may submit feedback in the form of articles, forum postings, and comments. At any time, you may submit feedback directly to altrisbeta@symantec.com.
Full post @ http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/altiris-beta-program-welcome-message
This morning a customer had 4 Win2000 servers with low memory problems. At first sight, task manager didn’t reveal any high memory-consuming processes. Aclient was consuming about 9000kb. Since these are production machines we can’t just reboot them whenever we feel like doing so.
We’ve upgraded the server to DS 6.9 SP3 two weeks ago. In the release notes (known issues), I’ve found an Altiris article that discusses our problem and the workaround was disabling the Agent autoupgrade feature and downgrading the Aclient Agent to 6.9 SP2 version on Win2000 servers. Luckily for me, Altiris posted a permanent solution this afternoon 
Article #51997
https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=51997&p=1
When you define Security groups in DS 6.9 SP3 in combination with the option “Display only computers and jobs the user has rights to manage”, users may experience a very very slow interface. By default, any user who can access the DS console, can see all jobs/computers.
There’s a noticable difference in performance when you need to browse jobs via the ‘select a job’ option because here Altiris evaluates all jobs against the user’s permissions.
I didn’t experience this behaviour as a DS Admin. This would be a good option if it didn’t slow down the console so much!
As this is my first post on The D-spot and so far no posts about Altiris exist, I’d thought to change that. Let’s start with the most usefull links concerning Altiris software.
Altiris Knowledge Base: http://kb.altiris.com
Contains KB’s, Glossary, Release notes, Compatibilitylists, Planning Guides etc.
Altiris FTP: ftp.altiris.com
Username: epmftp Password: Altiris123
Symantec Connect: http://www.symantec.com/connect/endpoint-management-virtualization
Best source for articles, custom Altiris tools & Altiris Forums
Altirigos Community-site: http://www.altirigos.com
Userforum and Altiris repository that contains old software releases.
Altiris Manuals: http://www.altiris.com/Support/Documentation.aspx
For those who like to join the beta-program: http://betanew.altiris.com
