Dear Friend,

We are computer engg. students from a college in India and we are having
certain difficulties with our final year project. Can you please help us
with it.

Now to tell you a little about our project.

We are designing a system for centralized distribution of software on Windows
systems. Let us consider the following scenario. We have a network of 10-20
computers and wish to make a product installation on several of these machines.
The problem we have is that we will have to visit every node individually
and repeat the same installation procedure on every node. This is a tedious
and time consuming job. Now, what we want to do is this, the software that
we build should be capable of performing these installations on remote machines,
COMPLETELY HAND FREE. And this should occur dynamically. The administrator
will just do the installation on a central server and tell our software where
this same program is to be installed. Our software can maintain such lists
for several softwares. Now, as soon as our software gets a message that some
terminal has come on the network(i dont know how to do this, please advise),
we will check if anything is mentioned in the list for this node and if yes,
the installation will begin here. If nothing is to be done for this node,
nothing will be done and our software will remain dormant.

Currently we have developed the front end which will be given to the administrator
to enter the names of the computers where the mentioned products will be
installed and also a part of the backend where in our main program will fire
this utility(which is actually PING) and tell us whether a required terminal
is present on the network.

Now, for the purpose of the actual installation of the software, one of my
friends referred me to a product called Zero Administration Kit(ZAK) from
Microsoft Corp. We dont know much about this product but its documentation
states that it can perform HANDS FREE installations which suits our purpose.
If you know anything about ZAK, please tell us, viz how to configure it to
manage installations of products(as per our knowledge, it can do this for
on MS Office '97 and WinNT and that also we are not being able to do). Please
suggest other ways in which this can be done.

Also, please tell me how to configure TELNET utility on our computers and
also how can we establish a TELNET session through our software so that we
can work(through the software) as though we are working on the remote machine.
This is required because we will need to simulate as though the remote machine
is making a request for our Software installation program (ZAK) where as
we will be doing it on the server itself. This is explained below.
I want the server to start a Telnet session(yes, the server will start the
session) with the client. First of all, is this possible if the configuration
of a telnet service is made on the client? And is it possible to control
the session through our software, ie, is it possible to issue commands to
the telnet service through our program and will it have the same effect as
it would have had, had someone been sitting on the server and executed the
same commands through Telnet's terminal emulator?

We will be very much indebted to you if you could help us with this. We will
be waiting for your reply. Kindly do it as soon as possible because we have
to complete this project within next one and half weeks. Any kind of suggestions
will be highly appreciated.
With high hopes, we remain,
Yours faithfully,
Girish & Brijesh

You can mail us at pankajjava@hotmail.com