Purpose
You wish to install and maintain PDQ products on a server with limited or no access to the Internet.
Resolution
PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory are ideally designed to run on servers which have access to the Internet in order to receive updates, including both product updates and updates to the Package Library and Collection Library within PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory respectively. Despite this, they can be configured to work from an offline server in cases where allowing external access to the network is not an option.
Activating the Products
When activating an Enterprise license of either PDQ Deploy or PDQ Inventory on an offline server, you can activate using your license key as normal. The license information, including expiration date, contact information, and number of administrators, is encoded into the license key itself and the products are able to recognize this information without reaching out to any external activation service.
Migrating an Existing Installation
If you are moving to an offline installation from an existing online installation of PDQ products, a good first step would be to migrate your existing databases. This will let you keep all of your existing packages, collections, variables, and computer information. The topic of moving your databases and other information is covered in each of these articles:
Moving PDQ Deploy to another computer
Moving PDQ Inventory to another computer
Importing Library Information
Although you will not be able to automatically download updates to the Package Library and Collection Library from an offline environment, you can export any packages you have downloaded from the Package Library and import them to your offline server. You can do so by right-clicking on the packages or collections you would like to export and selecting “Export” which will allow you to save them as a .xml file. Once transferred to the offline server, you can import that .xml file to load those packages and collections. Although collections from the Collection Library cannot be exported, custom collections exported in this way will include the values of any custom variables they reference as part of the xml. When importing a package, you will also need to be sure to copy any files referenced in the package to your offline server’s repository.
It is important to note when importing schedules, packages, and collections that the unique IDs for those objects in the database are not maintained through the import. Any collections and packages tied to a schedule will need to be re-added after the import. Static collections export member computers based on their FQDN rather than using their database IDs, so they are usually unaffected by this.
Alternatively, if only part of your environment is offline and your PDQ server is able to communicate with another computer that has access to external resources, you can set up your PDQ server in Central Server mode and configure the machine with external access as a client to that server. This will allow the client to act as a proxy, downloading updates to the Package Library and Collection Library and transferring them to the PDQ server. Resources on configuring Central Server can be found here:
Configuring Central Server - PDQ Deploy
Configuring Central Server - PDQ Inventory
See Also
Article - Create Packages for Air-gap/Offline (No-Internet Networks)
