Environment
Novell ZENworks 7.5 Asset Management - ZAM7.5
Situation
Vista
(Business, Ultimate and Enterprise, 32 & 64 bit)
has
a new feature called "User Account Control" (UAC) which is designed
to prevent
unauthorized changes to the computer. This is controlled by
an option in the
User Accounts applet of the Control Panel and defaults to
on.
The most
noticable action of this feature is the presentation of a
confirmation
dialog when accessing virtually any applet from the Control
Panel. The
apparent function that is effecting us is that it mostly locks down
the Program
Files (PF)directory and everything under it. While Services seem to
have no
problem writing to the PF directory structure ,things run by the
user,
regardless that the user is an Admin, can't.
This results in the Knowledgebase files (.kb) not being updated in the Filestore by a merge, Collection Option Set .kb files not being saved when saved within the ZAM Manager, and the inability to create an OPTIONS.TXT file in our Collection Client \bin directory to control the Collector.
Resolution
There are 3 things that can be done to work around this issue;
1. Turn UAC off.
2.
Install ZAM (both the full "back end" and individual clients)
somewhere
other than C:\Program Files\Novell\ZENWorks\Asset Management.
Suggest
C:\Novell\ZENWorks\Asset Management.
3.
Enable the Administrator account, give it a password (or not as
desired)
and use this to log into the machine when you are going to use the
Manager or
need to create an Options.txt to troubleshoot client issues.
Apparently in
Vista being in the Administrators Group does not equate, as it does
in prior
Windows OS', to being the Administrator. The account is
created at install but
is disabled by default with an unknown (if any)
password.
These work arounds work for all the Vista types.