Tag Archives: altiris

Facts About Combine License Workshop

Reposted from here.

The License Workshop can be used to download the licenses for all Altiris products registered to your company (or group of companies), or to combine and download licenses for a particular Altiris product.

Combining Licenses

When two or more license certificates for the same product are combines into a single certificate, the new maintenance date that is embedded in the certificate is the lesser of all the dates.

For example, if you combine 100 nodes of a product with a maintenance date ending 01-01-2007 with 100 nodes with a maintenance date ending 06-01-2007, the new certificate will be created for 200 nodes with a maintenance expiration date of 01-01-2007.

When the maintenance expires on the combined license you can use the License Management Portal to received your licenses in a new configuration, or you may contact your Sales Representative to have your maintenance dates co termed to a single date.

During the co terming process, the maintenance expiration dates on combines licenses will also be combined. All combined licenses will assume the shorted maintenance duration available from the individual licenses.

Example, if you combine two license files, one having 6 months remaining and the other having 8 months remaining, the maintenance window of the combined license files will have a maintenance duration of 6 months) At the end of the combined licenses term, you will have the opportunity to use the remaining two months of support in the example by installing the individual license key containing the remaining maintenance.

The Maintenance assigned to the license is the lesser of the Maintenance dates assigned of the licenses being combines or 7 months from the day the license is being created. When licenses are, the .txt files must have at least 7 months of Maintenance assigned or the license will timed out.

Using the License Workshop

* Option 1
Allow you to download the licenses for all your Altiris products at once. When choosing this option, the system will automatically combine licenses for products you own into as few license files as possible, placing the licenses into a single ZIP file that is downloaded to your computer.

The licenses downloaded will be for all Altiris companies associated with your Symantec account, and is not affected by the check boxes show in the Option 2 area of the page.

* Option 2 Download Selected Licenses (Combined)

When more than one Altiris company is associated with your account, a list of those companies will be displayed on the page. New license purchase with your Symantec account will be listed under the name ‘ New Licenses’. (There may be multiple companies listed due to grouping that was done in Altiris, and also grouping that was done when Altiris information was moved to Symantec)

Using the check boxes nest to the company names, choose the companies associated with the products to be combined (to keep things simple, you may wish to leave all companies selected) . As you change the selected companies, the list of products will change to show all combinable products for the selected companies. If there is only one company associated with your account, you will not be able to deselect it.)

Next select a product to combine from the list of products- only combinable products with active support will be listed. Please not that only individual products are combinable- suites of products are not.

Finally, combine the desired licenses using the arrows, and click on the download button to obtain a single combined license file for the selected product (the maintenance co termination rules noted above will apply.)

Manually Installing the Symantec Management Agent

While logged on to the machine you want to install the agent, locate the installation file.  One place to get the file is to drill down into the Symantec Management Platform (SMP) server NSCap share that is created when the server is installed.  In the example below, <SMP Server> is the hostname or FQDN of your SMP server.

\\<SMP Server>\NSCap\bin\Win32\X86\NS Client Package\AeXNSC.exe

Copy the file to your machine and then open a command prompt to execute AeXNSC.exe.  Run the command prompt as administrator on Windows 2008 and Windows 7.  In my example here, I placed it in C:\Temp because I will not actually need the file after the installation is done.

Determine where you want the installation path to be.  If this is going to be a package server, make sure that the location is somewhere you’ll have plenty of disk space for packages.  In my example, I’m using the default.  You can substitute anything else you want, like “E:\ServerApps\Altiris” or whatever… You’ll also need to inform the installer what the FQDN of the SMP server is.  The sytax is like this:

AeXNSC.exe /install /path=<My installation path> /ns=<SMP FQDN>

The installer then decompresses to start installing.  It went by too fast for me to catch a screenshot of it.  It looks very similar to other installers that count to 100.  Once the installer finishes running you’ll get a success prompt that will look similar to this one.  If you’re maticulous, you can delete AeXNSC.exe that you used to start the installation.

You can monitor the installation by drilling down to the installation path. 

Optionally, you can also launch AeXAgentActivate.exe to monitor a little closer.

Click on the settings link  to look at the Agent Settings.

You’ll see that the SMP server is shown with what we told it with the /ns switch.   Within 15 minutes, it will update with the SMP server, get applicable policies and proceed to be managed.  If you’re kind of impatient, you can click the Update button to try and force it to update with the SMP server and keep things moving along.  This works kind of like when a pedestrian would press the walk button at an intersection.  After the first update, the button is more responsive to policy updates.  As new plug-ins are installed, the agent will restart and close these windows.  That’s a good sign that things are progressing along as intended.