LAN Ranger alternative

[broc]

We have used Impero for about 18 months now. It's very much a product in development still, which has some positives and negatives.

 

The positives are the development team are very approachable, easily contacted and receptive to ideas for enhancing the product. I have seen a significant number of product enhancements delivered as a result of suggestions made through some pretty active threads on their support forum.

 

The negatives are minor, occasionally they break something when a new release comes out, and secondly they do seem to release updates frequently so keeping up to date with new functions can be challenging.

 

Overall, we would say that it has been extremely effective in our school; staff like it as it gives them control as well as providing some useful facilities to aid teaching too.

 

The ICT support team like it because it has some useful facilities to execute tasks across multiple client PCs & monitor what is going on.

 

The students hate it, because it can be very effective at keeping them on task. They have even coined a new expression, "I have been imperoed"

[bossman]

Moving up to CC4 summer with SAN back end and 10Tb backup solution including virtualisation software will only have to upgrade licenses at £45 each client but it will include a whole host of new features including total control for teachers, all this for £45 per client and will be ours for good and not have to keep shelling out every year or get bogged down rewriting scripts when there has been a Microsoft update makes life a lot easier so i can get on with other things to benefit the school.

It's ok to save money and i don't condemn anyone who does but there comes a time when a little spent saves a whole fortune later on it depends on how you view it and the workloads placed upon the IT support.

I would say over 6 years we have spent approx £250,000 on the network, some schools have spent in excess of between £2m - £3m depending on the size of the school and also if they have a sixth form.

[MikW]

Another vote for Lanview here, in fact MST software have some excellent utilities.

We ditched Ranger a while back and really haven't missed the horrible beast since.

[cookie_monster]

I can appreciate where you're coming from bossman but we have made big savings since we left RM for Ranger and i see us making even more savings once we remove Ranger. We feel we have the in house skill to not need RM and have developed a pretty low maintenance network here it's certainly not any more work than when we were RM.

 

Wow i've never seen even close to £2m - £3m, if only :-)

 

As i say LanRanger is the only tool we can't replace. Ranger Remote is a great tool but it's not as instant access as LanRanger for certain tasks.

 

Cheers.

[MikW]

The only feature i think we will really miss is LAN Ranger as it allows us to see which stations are turned on or logged on in real time and you can also shutdown all stations with one click (i know psshutdown will do this but it's not a slick).

 

Sorry to harp on but Lanview will do this, it's free, it's in msi format so you can deploy the client through Group Policy and it's free.;-)

[cookie_monster]

@ MikW, i'm having a play with it now, again i haven't used it for a while.

[burgemaster]

We are currently having big problems with NETOP 5.5 and Ranger working together.....

 

Both are blaming each other, netop 5.0 is fine, but 5.5 just hangs at login with the field background...... annoying

[Ravening_Wolf]

Though I've not looked at it or seen any costs there is a Ranger alternative called Impero. Seems to combine features of LR and RRC

 

Impero is outstanding - highly recommended.

[Michael]

I moved just the one school off Ranger and they were absolutely delighted when the network was running quicker, but also that the school no longer had an annual fee to re-new the software.

 

Ranger is just like RM as far as I am concerned, as Active Directory is still running in the background.

 

If you want an easy way to shutdown all workstations, you can use XP's own shutdown utility. Right click your desktop and choose New > Shortcut. Copy this line:

 

%systemroot%\system32\Shutdown.exe

 

Click Next and name the shortcut, Shutdown Workstations then click Finish. Right click the shortcut and choose Properties.

 

In the target field add /i so it reads:

 

%systemroot%\system32\Shutdown.exe /i

 

Now apply changes. You can give it a nice icon by clicking Change Icon if you like too Now double click the shortcut. You can now Browse your domain and shutdown workstations either in groups or individually. Hope this helps!

[Oops_my_bad]

We are running totally vanilla 2k3R2 and XP here.. the only thing we have ontop is Dameware NT utilities (which includes the remote control stuff). Very fair licensing too.

[cookie_monster]

I use Psshutdown.

 

We use Dameware mini remote but not the full NT utilities.

[INeedAUsername]

Maniac,

Hi, how did you remove Ranger from your network? The way I see it I have to rebuild half the network??!!

 

May thanks for your help

 

STariq

[maniac]

Maniac,

Hi, how did you remove Ranger from your network? The way I see it I have to rebuild half the network??!!

 

May thanks for your help

 

STariq

 

It was well over a year ago now when we did this, and I've moved onto a different school since, but as far as I can remember you will have to log onto all your ranger enabled workstations as the 'rangerremove' user first, which uninstalls the ranger componants from the workstation.

 

After this was complete on all the workstations, we simply un-installed ranger in the normal way from the servers using add remove programs from control panel. I don't remember it being that complecated at all.

 

Mike.

[INeedAUsername]

Thanks for this Manic,

 

Ranger is linked with AD so if i log on as a student on a non-ranger PC then they cant log on??

 

I am going to build a test network and see how I get on, fingers crossed it should be OK but who knows..

 

Many thanks for your help

 

STariq

[apearce]

Your test network needs to have the same domain name if you going to install ranger - with the license code.

 

You'll find the install files on HSDC01 ;-)

[apearce]

hang on a minute - isn't removing ranger just a batch script? Could you not just run this script from a remote location and remove that way?

[qphs]

Hi, We are going to remove Ranger from our network, it causes so many issues. I don't see the need for it as good GPO and web filter policy is adequate. However, one feature I do like (and its the only feature) is the ability to create software packages for deployment of small apps and configuration changes. My question is. Is there an Open Source alternative (or even a paid version) that can do this part only? Thanks