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How to catch offline and online computers on a schedule

Sam D

November 25, 2014 22:09

I would like to schedule deployments for Monday morning at 3 am. I have many desktop computers that are already online...however I also have a lot of laptop users that may not be in until later.

I've been trying to figure out how to catch all computers with the heartbeat schedule...the problem is that the computer has to be offline first. It waits until it detects the change from offline to online and then begins the deployment.

It seems like if I got up at 3 am on Monday I could click "Begin Deployement (Start Schedule)" and it would start deploying and then use the heartbeat for the offline computers. Obviously I don't want to get up that early.

Am I missing something? Is there anyway to use a Heartbeat schedule to do this? (I can't get Enterprise to get the Retry Queue, at the moment)

Thanks!

Comments

7 comments

n.shortt
February 03, 2015 21:01

I too, am faced with laptop users.They are not on the domain but one week in four. Did you find an answer/solution?

Thanks

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Sam D
February 04, 2015 13:52
This is what I did...it works pretty well to catch everyone:
1. Make a collection in PDQ Inventory for computers that do NOT have the software you will deploy installed
2. In PDQ Deploy's preferences-->Deployments make sure you have "Scan after Deployment" checked. This will make sure computers are removed from the collection after the package is installed.
3. Setup your Package in PDQ Deploy. Check "Use Custom Timeout" and set it to 60 minutes.
4. Then I setup 2 deployments; the first is scheduled for Monday at 3 am (when my desktops turn on); the second is a heartbeat deployment for Monday at 4 am which will catch any Laptops that turn on later.
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n.shortt
February 17, 2015 23:08

Thank you!

Took a bit to setup but, works like a charm :)

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Eddie Rowe
May 11, 2015 21:20

Sam D, I am confused by what you're doing. When you do a deployment PDQ Deploy builds a list of systems to deploy the package(s). How are you dynamically updating the list of systems that PDQ is going to target at 4AM?

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Sam D
May 11, 2015 22:43

eddie,

You need to setup a collection in PDQ Inventory of computers that do NOT have the software you want installed. Instead of deploying to a static list, deploy to that PDQ Inventory collection.

If you've set it up right, computers will be removed from the collection after they've been deployed to, so it won't hit the same machine twice.

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Eddie Rowe
May 12, 2015 21:55

Thanks Sam for the reply - I am still in the early stages of working with the tools. I was not creating a schedule so the option to "Link To" was not available so that was what I was missing. I think this will be very nice way to catch PCs that are refreshed/imaged to get any updates that are missing from my baseline as well as installations in response to needs by automating the deployments once PDQ Inventory sees the installation.

http://documentation.adminarsenal.com/PDQDeploy/6.1.0.0/targets_editor.htm

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mmuni
May 13, 2015 13:57

Tips:

1 - Disable WOL in preferences. This will make a huge difference in time it takes to deploy.

2 - setup auto Active Directory sync if you have that option. This will bring in new computers in active directory and remove deleted computers.

3 - Set your scan profiles to refresh when they get to a certain age. Example: I have my applications refresh daily, and a full scan refresh's weekly.

4 - make sure each of you packages performs the correct scan after it deployed. Example app install/uninstall should then run the application scan on that computer.

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