Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'ARD3 does this for you?' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
ARD3 does this for you?
Authored by: Sebbo on Jul 17, '06 11:42:03AM

If you're sending out the command via ARD, is this not easier to use the Software Version Report feature?

Reports > Software Version…

One can compare versions of up to 10 apps to against those installed on the admin machine. Tick "Rebuild data for report" to ensure you're using fresh (not cached) data. I've been using this with Office 10 and 11. Does take longer than expected to gather the data though.



[ Reply to This | # ]
ARD3 does this for you?
Authored by: thebug on Jul 17, '06 02:33:24PM
That's why I wrote this. Compared to that report, this is Fast. Not to mention that the report is not always correct.

It doesn't take much for the command to be altered, adding other logic. I'll often want to find machines with a version older than x.y.z. Or, I need to know about certain versions mixed with various OS versions. Makes it quicker to re-select those machine in ARD to send out the update command/package/etc.

I have a command that can log results to a database that I merge against the asset tracking database. That nicely tracks everything, and when a new machine is deployed, it shows up on my list w/o having to scan it from ARD as well as giving me some idea where it might be....I have many locations/ip blocks a machine could end up in.

So yeah, the report is nice, and works. I find my solution to be nicer. :-)

OTH, the report works w/o you having to knock out a unix command. This trick only works for apps with Resource forks, though you can do a similar thing for most .app apps, by looking at SomeApp.app/Contents/Info.plist instead of the App/rsrc file.

Though it's much simpler to just do:

defaults read '/Applications/App.app/Contents/Info' CFBundleVersion

---
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

[ Reply to This | # ]