Physics Computing Facility: Identifying OSU-Purchased Macs for LANDesk Agent Installation

[Barber, Matthew]

Physics Faculty and Staff,

The Physics Computing Facility has been working on leveraging a new tool (LANDesk) purchased by the College of Arts and Sciences. This tool allows us to accurately report computing inventory, mitigate security threats through patching and software distribution, and even provide remote assistance to computers within the Physics network. All-in-all, it aims to make us more effective in our mission of supporting you.

With that said we need your help! For LANDesk to function we need to install a tiny agent on each OSU-purchased computer. For most Windows and Linux systems, this can be accomplished from afar. However, we do not have a way to remotely install the LANDesk Agent on computers running Mac OS X. 

So, if you have a Mac that was purchased with funds from OSU (including sponsored research funding), we need to know about it so we can schedule a time to install the agent. The agent installation only takes a few minutes and will not impact the way you use your computer from that point forward. It will be used to keep an inventory of computer systems within our department, to patch software vulnerabilities, and to allow us to provide remote assistance if you request it.

As summer is approaching we need to get a jump on this project to be able to meet with those that will be more unavailable during the summer months. If you aren't going to be around for any portion of the summer please let us know that in your response as well. We will prioritize based on availability and once we have heard from you we will do our best to promptly schedule to get the agent installed!
If you have any questions about LANDesk please feel free to email or call me or stop by PRB1199 to see us.

Sincerely,
Matthew C. Barber

Physics Computing Facility
1199 Physics Research Building
Physics Department
The Ohio State University
191 W. Woodruff Ave.
Columbus, OH 43210

Phone: 614.292.4269
Fax: 614.292.7557
Email: barber.107 at osu.edu