[wpkg-users] Duplicate host names

[Antony Awaida]

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