Eddie Turner's Blog

It’s been just over a month since the long-awaited arrival of version 3.4 of the K2000  on the Dell KACE download page. Countless customers have applied the upgrade to their boxes and are reporting unbridled enthusiasm over the enhancements 3.4 has introduced.

One of the most complex areas of systems deployment is the area of driver management. The K2000 strives to simplify the process of driver management in several ways. Historically, the K2000 relied on a manual process to load drivers to a share on the appliance. There are semiautomatic upload tools such as the Driver Harvest Utility and other third-party products. For the most part driver management was a manual process until now thanks to the introduction of the automatic driver feed option.

Originally introduced in 3.3, the Driver Feed perhaps, is receiving the most notable attention of all the enhancements. The Driver Feed gives Dell customers (Only Latitude, Optiplex and Precision at this time) a seamless feed of current drivers automatically delivered to their appliance with the click of a check box. Essentially, when Dell.com updates the driver library the K2000’s feed automatically updates the feed updates the customer’s future scripted installation (network operating system) deployments accordingly.

To complement the Dell Driver Feed, Kent Feid, a Senior Enterprise Solutions Trainer and resident Scripting Ninja wrote a Driver Feed Builder tool. This tool gives non-Dell customers an automatic channel to facilitate adding drivers to a repository that will automatically deploy during a scripted installation.

As noted in the foregoing, both the Driver Feed and the Driver Feed Builder automatically deliver the necessary drivers for a machine during the deployment of scripted installations. What about imaging? Do we have a way to automatically deliver drivers for images? Indeed! The work of Kent Feid and Corey Serrins, the lead K2000 Enterprise Solutions Engineer, has resulted in a driver feed workaround that automatically deliver drivers as a post install task for images. In fact, this solution has allowed some customers to make one image for all computers—regardless of hardware configuration! This is an exciting development!

Yes, the K2000, a leader in systems deployment continues to get better and better. The new 3.4 update and complementary scripts continue to separate it from the crowd! Drivers made easy! System deployment made easy!