The five winners of the Admin Arsenal contest have been drawn. I used the services of random.org to calculate the corresponding random numbers. They use atmospheric noise to compute true random numbers, so you can be sure that it was a fair contest. If you are among the winners, then you should have received an email from Brisworks, the sponsor of this contest, by now. If you haven’t been lucky this time, I encourage you to have a look at Admin Arsenal. This systems management tool is certainly worth its price. You don’t even have to register to download the free 30-day trial.

In the future, you will have the chance to win other admin tools as I am planning to run such contests frequently. I created a page that lists all 4sysops prize games. At the moment you have the chance to win a license of AutoAdministrator 2.0, a nifty tool that lets you automate all kinds of typical Windows administration tasks. There will be more tools to come soon.

Below are some of the responses of the participants in the Admin Arsenal contest. I want to say thanks to all who agreed to allow me to publish their answers to this question:

Describe the biggest challenge that you face as a Windows system administrator.

Feel free to post your answer as a comment to this article. I know that quite a few vendors of admin tools read this blog. Chances are that one of them will implement your ideas.

Answers of the Admin Arsenal contest:

Working with folder/share security is the biggest challenge for me.

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One of the biggest challenges I face as a Windows sysadmin is the combination of license management and software inventory. How many people have the latest version of Adobe Pro? Who are they? Do they really need it? How many of my licenses have I used? How much is this costing me?

All questions I ask myself very often without a great way to answer them. Of course I’m not the only one asking about this, management is too. So I don’t just need to see the raw data myself, I need to compile it into a sort able, comprehensive, rich report and deliver it to my superiors.

Short and sweet, that is by far my biggest challenge.

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I would say that my biggest challenge, or maybe just the biggest nuisance, as a Windows System Administrator is managing deployment of third-party updates in an organized fashion. There’s nothing more aggravating than having to whip up MSI installers and transformations for every new patch that comes out for Acrobat Reader, Java, Shockwave player, Flash, Quicktime, and so forth, and then configure a GPO. Plus, determining whether these installs were successful is a pain since you have to look through logs on each machine, or else just drop by and see what things look like. I dream of the day that there is a tool as easy to use as WSUS for this purpose.

By comparison, sifting through server logs and making rule changes on our firewalls seems downright easy and straightforward. Software like MS’s SCCM or Symantec’s equivalent are reportedly bloated, not to mention very expensive, so I am intrigued by Admin Arsenal.

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Protecting USB ports, without having to spend a fortune, but still support AD integration.

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Since we are a non-profit, the biggest challenge I face is working within incredibly tight budget requirements. Beyond that, the biggest challenge we have is managing offsite users, and making sure that all systems have the latest software/patches. Also, handling software updates and patches for laptop users who travel very frequently, thus making it hard to schedule updates, etc. Right now we are checking things by hand when we need to, and a number of systems are not getting updated correctly.

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For me, the biggest problem is keeping plug-ins and add-ons up to date while having users run without admin privileges. By add-ons, I mean:

Flash, Java, Adobe Updater, Windows Live, Google Earth and Sketchup, etc.

It seems that every time one of these applications has a new update come out, I have to figure out a new way to deploy the update. Sometimes they show up as .msu, .msi, .exe, self-extracting zip, etc. Or, in the case of Windows Live, they don’t release an MSI. You have to download the Live installer, select the app, then find the msi on your PC. Then the msi is sometimes missing components to make the full app work. What a hassle!

It would really save a lot of time if these companies would recognize that companies would like to use their products and provide simple msi’s for deployment.

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Just one? That’s tough.. seems to shift from day to day.

Personally I find that just keeping up with the tidal wave of new tools, methods, tricks, etc is the greatest challenge. Even worse when I am completely new to a particular concept. For example I’ve been a sys admin for 15 years and only now I’m considering changing OS deployment methods.

Rather than using sysprep/ghost/boot CD I would like to shift to MDT/ImageX/PXE boot (WDS). Getting up to speed with the suite of tools available is like drinking from a fire hose. I see lots of great stuff on your site that I would love to leverage but, I don’t have the foundation of knowledge of the infrastructure in place yet. It’s like reading about the advantages of the HOV lane on the highway without knowing how to drive.

More related to the tool you are focused on, I think that when a user complains that a machine is “slow” or “hiccupping” for some unknown reason -especially in a random pattern. It’s difficult to diagnose and repair such issues in less time that it takes to rebuild a machine which leaves me unsatisfied.

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My biggest challenge as a Windows Sys Admin is to hardware inventory monitoring. There are a number of different tools that are available to manage hardware. However none that I have tried are good. Admin Arsenal will be very effective in accomplishing this task.

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The biggest challenge I face in managing my Windows network is change management on the desktops and servers.

When a workstation or Citrix server behaves differently, I want to know how the software versions differ, and how key parts of the registry might have been modified, like the Session Manager keys for memory management, or what has changed with the many, many AutoRun keys, or what drivers (which actually get loaded) have changed versions or file dates.