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NSMC 4.0
by Bob Kelly

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It is important to plan your rollout of NSMC- choosing "Standard" to select all the components on your initial installation, and then choosing to install consoles (and/or services) individually on other machines depending upon your environment. When installing on additional systems, choose "Custom" and you will see the NSMC console is the only item pre-selected (no services, or databases).

Client Installation

Client installation? None here; NSMC does not require a client service to be installed on managed systems. This is an excellent benefit to NSMC in that you have no client software to deploy, or manage.

NSMC uses WMI to remotely collect information and manage specified systems. While no client software is necessary, the dependency on WMI does require that you have it installed on those systems to be managed. For Windows 2000 and later systems, WMI is included as part of the Windows distribution and nothing more is required. The documentation provides details on the installation and configuration of WMI for Windows 95/98/NT SP6, including access control, DCOM and WMI permissions.

Click for full viewOne of the first steps following installation is to discover systems to be managed (see image at right). You may select any available domains to be scanned and using the Options menu can even specify IP ranges to enumerate. As you would expect, you may also create machine groups to more easily manage large numbers of systems.

Now what can we do with these managed systems? Naturally a system as robust as this cannot be covered from top to bottom in a simple review, but as usual I will attempt to highlight what I see as the key features of NSMC and those elements that may set it apart from the competition. Before we begin, it is worth noting that the non-evasive nature of NSMC helps enable inventorying, distributions, and monitoring functions to easily traverse corporate firewalls, VPNs, and WAN connections.

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