Hi Rainer: Thanks for the reply. The scenario we are considering is one where a student may have more than one PC.... Of course, each machine will have the WPKG client. We are looking into using the PC serial number - instead of the host name- to assign individual profiles to individual machines. Individual PC profiles in turn are associated with a student profile and so on. Of course, then, we would use the /profile:<serialnumber> command-line attribute. Do you foresee any problems with the above? Thanks! Antony On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 1:50 AM, Rainer Meier <r.meier at wpkg.org> wrote: > Hi Antony, > > > On 09.08.2013 23:50, Antony Awaida wrote: >> >> We are looking to use WPKG in a higher ed environment where students >> may bring their own computers (the computers are not members of AD, >> Group etc...). > > > You might use extended host attributes to match profiles to dedicated hosts. > But actually if you operate a kind of BYOD environment then users might > change hostnames and even MAC adresses and also their entire physical > machine any time they wish. > > Such machines are hard to maintain by software deployment at first since > users have full access on them. They might install/uninstall any software at > any time. In order to deploy software reliably you would have to install > some sort of WPKG client on them (which the users can also remove again > immediately). > > If you're willing to go down this lane and if your users deal well with it I > would recommend to install the client in order to use the > /profile:<profileName> > command-line attribute. So actually you would assign a profile on the client > regardless of its hostname, IP-address, MAC-address, OS version etc. WPKG > would not even look up the hosts database and just go for the profile > specified on the command line. > > Since in such environments the clients are anyway very individually set up > this way might be the most safe way to assign the desired profile to the > client. > > > In fact you might even assign a custom profile to each of these-hosts by > using meta-profiles like > /profile:user-usernameXY > Then define user-username-XY profile to include the profiles you would like > to assign. This way each machine can have its own individual profile > specified so you might assign custom software to each node. Or refer to some > "standard set" by including other, generic profiles. > > > br, > Rainer |