Help with computer networking / servers please?

Question

When my college installs a new peice of software for computers in the college, they dont even have to go to the computers indivusally. They haven't been and installed it on all computers individually, but new software is somehow installed on all computers without them physically installing on each comptuer. How have they installed it to each computer, without anyone even going to each computer to install new software?

The other question is, everyone on the college network can access their own document whereever they log on around the college. does this mean that everybodies documents are stored on servers in the college and when for example, i log onto a computer, my documents are all called to the computer i log onto from the server? Thanks

Answer 1

You college probably does remote installation/package management through a server. Several OS vendors have products that can do this, as well as some open source solutions. At the university I'm at we can push software packages and configurations out to clients at night over the network. In the past PC techs had to do this manually and it could take weeks. Now one person sets up a software package (the software and any configuration needed) ahead of time, sets a timer for some time at night and that's it. Its done automatically and ~2500 computers are updated in a few hours.



Question two - you are probably referring to drive mapping. Everyone gets a chunk of a storage array which they can access from the network. This can be accomplished in a couple different ways, but the ones I'm familiar with are direct access, drive mapping, and roaming profile. In the direct access method you just open a file system connection to the network drive and enter your credentials. For example, in Windows you can go to Start>Run and type in \\\ and after entering a user name and password a Window will open with your network files. Drive mapping does basically the same thing, but it the connection is setup like a local drive. Example, again in Windows, you would map a drive and it would show up under Computer with a drive letter and it should be their every time you login. Roaming profile takes drive mapping a step further. In an environment with roaming profiles, all your settings (desktop, icons, email setting, drive mappings, etc) follow you to whatever computer you login to on the campus (To the pros: I know there is more to it than that, I'm keeping it simple).

Answer 2

1. They install the software on the main frame server that services all the network computers is how this is done. It is like the Master Computer of the college that runs all the other computers on the network.



2. Good question. Your specific computer has it's owe place in the server for storage of documents. Only your computer and the main frame can access these documents. So yes when you log in to the Main frame your documents are there for you to view.

Answer 3

In both cases, the each computer is connected to two servers.



The first server acts like an imaging server, where if a piece of software is installed, the computer is sent that program with all the licensing information.



The second server is your network drive, where every student is given a partition or folder in a shared network server.

Answer 4

The information is stored on a local server, and then when you attempt to open a document or program through a computer, the information is called from the server, and sent over the network directly to your computer.

Answer 5

in both cases, its probably all stored on servers in the college and called when you log on. the documents is called when a specific user logs on and the software is called when the computer is logged on from any account, unless different users have access to different sofftwre and programs.

Answer 6

Whenever you log on, they can run scripts. I'm assuming that because you log in, that your machine was added to some "domain". If so, that automatically gives the domain admins full access to your computer, and your login script runs various scripts on your PC, including updates to their software.