In many shops, field laptops are rarely on VPN to the corporate network, in some cases only for 20-30 minutes of downloading email. Once there's a LANDesk agent on the system and a Management Gateway on the Internet, there are many ways to handle this situation, but pushing 30 megs of LANDesk client (including AV) in the first place is a bit tougher. Assuming that you have any access to execute any script though, it can be done.

The capability was introduced in LDMS 8.6.1, but early implementations had a nasty bug with MSI GUID generation and you should make sure that you've patched recently. Otherwise you won't be able to upgrade an old Advance Agent install to a new one.

To do the job, you first need to make an agent configuration which takes the remote machine into account. It should run inventory scans, policy checks, and security scans on its own via local scheduler. If you're a fan of the bandwidth checking local scheduler options introduced in 8.7.2, be careful that you specify the gateway or some always-on internet site instead of your core, or you'll never hear from this laptop again. Manually install the agent on a laptop and test it through your gateway thoroughly. (Automated gateway certificate installation is going to be necessary too, but that's beyond the scope of this page). You might want to activate Agent Watcher too.

When it's working right, right-click the agent and select Advance Agent, then modify the URL to point at an Internet facing website where you'll post the files.

When you click okay, an .msi and .exe file will be created in ldlogon\advanceagent. The MSI contains a TMC/PD client and instructions to get the URL specified with the bandwidth usage attributes specified. Copy the .exe to the Internet server which you want to use -- say, I dunno, your Management Gateway? Then distribute the .msi as a GPO, VPN login script, email, or web page link.

I was recently asked for step by step instructions for putting these files on the gateway: I'll fill in with screenshots at a later date. I'm also assuming you have console access.

1. Copy the agent files onto a USB drive.
2. Plug the USB drive into the gateway server.
3. On the server's console, exit to terminal and type the following:

sudo mknod sdb b 8 16
sudo mknod sdb1 b 8 17
sudo mkdir /mnt/usb
sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb
sudo cp -a /mnt/usb/Remote* /usr/LANDesk/broker/webroot/client/

The mknod commands may not be necessary or may be different on your system; a lot depends on what version of the gateway you have and what kind of hardware you're using. In this example, they let the system know that it should expect block devices at the second position on the SCSI bus, because that's where dmesg said that the server would set up the thumbdrive.

I assume that your .msi and .exe files are named something like RemoteConfiguration, please edit accordingly. Also note that the client directory has a index.html in it and there won't be a listing; nevertheless the files are there and can be downloaded with a full URL.