Question:

Can you tell me about the network(s) you administer with AA? How many users in how many locations, what mix of OS's, what kinds of users you support, what kinds of servers are you running?

Answer:

I work here at San Diego State University in the Student Health Services Department. SDSU’s Student Health Services provides full medical services to the student body at San Diego State University. We are a full service medical facility and provide a wide range of services with the exception of emergency care. Medical services include x-ray, urgent care, optometry, health and diet needs, and common medical issues.

I am the sole network administrator for a 300 workstation Active Directory network. There are currently 25 servers in production as well running everything from proprietary medical applications to standard support services like AD, backups, DNS, DHCP, etc. Workstations encompass both employee operated machines as well as over 80 machines in the various exam rooms. We also support the Athletic Medicine department that services all campus athletes.

Operating systems are all Windows XP and servers are Server 2003 with a recent introduction of Server 2008.

Question:

How do you use AA day-to-day? Is there one part of the program you use more than the rest?

Answer:

I use AA almost daily for a variety of reasons. Reasons for using AA include checking currently logged-in user. Remotely start and stop services. Kill processes. Deploy new software. And the biggest use would be the software inventory reports.

Question:

Can you tell me about a time or two AA was particularly helpful?

Answer:

In the last month, AA was particularly useful with our department's move to a new Anti-virus system. The new software could remotely uninstall the previous security software but would often fail as the old AV was annoyingly difficult to remove. With AA, I was able to go in and kill the AV processes and stop the services so the new AV could perform its designed functions and remove the old software before installing the new. This was a tremendous time saver and dramatically decreased the time of deployment of the new AV software.

Question:

What else should other system administrators know about AA?

Answer:

Other system administrators should know just how easy it is to get AA up and running. There are no agents, no heavy database requirements and it can run from a middle-of-the-road hardware and does not need a dedicated server. I currently run AA from my main desktop machine. The Active Directory synchronization does not take up system resources like some other management tools do. If you run AD, this is the tool to get.

Question:

What does your management think of AA?

Answer:

My manager states that AA is a “pretty cool tool.”