PDQ Deploy across networks/domains/workgroups
Adam Shearman Shearman
Hey all!
We've a bit of an odd setup here.
Currently have a domain for our PCs which PDQ Deploy and Inventory has been working perfectly on but i've another network (different subnet) that runs as a workgroup. This is mainly a Mac network but i've had to add 2 classrooms of PCs for a new course, and was wondering how i'd go about trying to push things out using PDQ Deploy to these PCs.
As it stands, the PCs are just set up as part of a basic workgroup, with a single user that auto logs on, with each computer having the same local credentials.
Resources can be accessed across each network as i've got inter-vlan routing set up on our backbone router.
Just wondering if anyone has any pointers of where to start?
Cheers.
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Comments
You don't *have* to be on a domain to get it to work, it just makes things a bit easier.
A few questions:
1. Can you access \\hostname\admin$ of a target computer from your PDQ server?
2. You said you can ping, is that by hostname as well as IP address?
If you answered yes to both of those, then really all you have to do is add a set of credentials to your PDQ Server that have rights to install software on those targets. (You can put a . in the domain field to specifiy it is a local account. )
Let's start there and I'll pick this up when I'm not on mobile.
Let us know how things work with Stephen's suggestion. It's a good one.
One thing that I did in higher ed when particular computers were more difficult to access (they'd drop from the domain, or their hostname wouldn't work for deployments) is deploy to them using their IP addresses instead of hostnames. It might be a bit tedious at first, but less so if you set them up for auto deployments.
Of course given that there's an auto-logon user for those PCs, the credentials you use for Deploy will have to be valid admin credentials on the endpoints to get the deployments to run, unless you choose to deploy as logged on user (or perhaps local system, not quite sure what would be best on this one).
So, ended up getting it all working in the end doing the following:
- Set static IP's on the classrooms in question
- Created target lists by IP, one for each classroom
- Added local admin credentials to PDQ Deploy
- Kept deployment type as "push"
- When deploying, set it to run as local system
Many thanks for the input guys and gals :)
You're very welcome. Glad you got everything working!
De nada!