Making a name with NT
Technical innovation in the enterprise usually means finding the best product to solve a particular problem. But individual software packages and standalone hardware components rarely provide an all-in-one solution. That's why Windows NT Magazine is spotlighting several organizations that combined in-house development, third-party products, and of course, Windows NT to produce unique and innovative solutions to technical problems in the enterprise.
For the second annual NT Innovators awards, the editorial staff of Windows NT Magazine asked readers to share their innovative and unique approaches to using NT. We accepted nominations on our Web site and selected the most exciting users of NT and third-party products in 1997.
Setup Manager, Sysdiff, and the Super Duper Retro Fixer
Imagine that you have 1200 workstations and servers to upgrade and customize for various job functions. You're upgrading not only the workstation hardware and the operating system, but also all the applications running on these workstations and servers. To complicate matters further, these 1200 workstations and servers are in 75 locations throughout the state—and some of the locations are extremely remote. Now, do the entire upgrade in a few months.
If this scenario sounds like one of those impossible case studies from Microsoft's Networking Essentials certification exam, think again. It's precisely the challenge that was facing systems consultant Hank Oen and the rest of the networking staff at APS, a power company in Arizona.
In 1997, APS simultaneously upgraded its network from Windows NT 3.51 to NT 4.0, distributed fixes, upgraded from MSMail to Exchange and from Office 4.3 to Office 97, and deployed CA Unicenter TNG to get more control over technical resources. Using Microsoft tools, third-party tools, and innovative homegrown network-testing solutions, APS's networking staff accomplished the upgrades with little disruption to the network users. The staff developed stable platforms of operating systems and applications, rolled out the platforms, and issued upgrades and patches with as little user involvement as possible.
Two resource kit tools helped the networking staff create the installation scripts to perform the upgrades: Setup Manager and Sysdiff. With Setup Manager, the networking staff created answer files to perform the unattended installations. With Sysdiff, they implemented a standard desktop across all machines.
The Sysdiff process involved three stages. In the first stage, the networking staff prepared the base installation and took a snapshot of it. In the second stage, they installed all the standard applications (including an email client and a telephone book) and made some changes to the Registry. Sysdiff then compared this setup with the snapshot to create a file noting the differences. In the last stage, Sysdiff used the differences file to reproduce the setup on the other machines.
Messing up 20 user configurations with a buggy installation is a mishap; messing up 900 user configurations is a disaster. So to avoid such a disaster, the next step for the networking staff was to test the 40+ user-installable business-unit application installations and software upgrades. To test the configurations, they used imagine LAN's ConfigSafe and Chicago-Soft's DLLaGator. These tools let staff members fine-tune the way they loaded the applications to achieve better application stability.
ConfigSafe protects a computer from buggy applications. In a version-controlled test environment, the network staff used ConfigSafe to compare the system before and after application software installation so that they could see exactly what the software was doing to the system, including what files the software installed and where it installed them.
DLLaGator's function is more specific: It creates a relational database of all file and module names that access a specific DLL. With this tool in the test environment, the networking staff determined which DLLs the applications shared and which DLL version the applications loaded; that way, they could make sure they used the most recent DLL version.
No matter how much testing occurs, an installation rolled out to nearly a thousand clients is bound to require some fixes. At first, as users filed bug reports, the networking staff created the patches and applied them to subsequent builds. After about the seventh iteration, however, the staff rolled all the patches into one executive file (internally known as the Super Duper Retro Fixer) and added the file to the user logon scripts so that the workstations prompted users to apply the patch when they logged on. The staff ran into some minor problems with the Super Duper Retro Fixer when a couple of Windows 95 machines became confused at logon and tried to apply the NT patches, which corrupted their Registries. But the problems weren't serious, and the staff quickly corrected them.
APS's installation innovation didn't end with the use of NT tools to create, fine-tune, and repair unattended installations. To make the applications and network as solid as possible, the networking staff created application simulators and network-testing devices to test network traffic patterns, packet load, and full-load database transaction response times. When you're running a WAN that encompasses most of the state and includes microwave relays, frame relays, and fractional T1 links, you must test the network thoroughly.
The upgrades aren't over yet. Oen expects APS to implement more changes in 1998, including the addition of new customer information systems, human resource systems, and financial systems.