Choosing, installing and customizing ThinMan Gateway

One of the headaches that the IT department of many companies is called upon to face and resolve is that of being able to centrally control and manage the workstations of peripheral offices in a uniform way together with the rest of the infrastructure. Medium or small companies may have branch offices spread across the territory, in the case of large organizations there may be a few but significant (in terms of number of workstations) branch offices, such as the various factories of an industry; often these are many small offices or operational and specialized headquarters, widely distributed across the territory with some device. Think of banks with a lot of branches or large-scale distribution and logistics with the network of sorting offices.

Choosing ThinMan Gateway

In these contexts, IT administration is often a source of either inefficiencies or business costs that are much higher than necessary, if proportionate to the numbers of remote stations compared to those in the main office. Ad-hoc solutions may be necessary (e.g. creating VPNs), frequent travels, HR or consultancy costs, and differentiated strategies are often adopted with standards (perhaps also security) and differentiated processes dedicated only to these stations, requiring to IT administrators specific operations that are less standard and less scalable. However, there are alternative solutions, which aim to “break down” these differences and make the management of these cases efficient, scalable and uniform to the rest of the company, with enormous savings for company resources in terms of time and money; we are talking about ThinMan Gateway, the component of the Praim ThinMan management console designed precisely to satisfy these needs and optimize the management of endpoints in peripheral and/or remote locations. ThinMan Gateway is included in the Network+ Feature Pack and is available in three modes: Software, Virtual and Hardware Appliance, depending on how it’s instantiated and served on the remote site network. All three versions offer the same functionality with the exception of the Software version which doesn’t allow to manage local replicas and distribution of Windows images and to carry out remote assistance on the device hosting the Gateway.

Installing and configuring ThinMan Gateway

Regardless of how you use Gateway, you can obtain it (to install or update it) on MyPraim, where the most updated version of the product is made available.

ThinMan Gateway download from MyPraim section

In the case of Hardware appliance, obviously, the device is supplied already set up but can be restored or updated using the firmware made available by Praim.

For the Software or Virtual appliances, however, once downloaded simply follow the simple first installation instructions (Software / Virtual), while all subsequent updates will be controllable directly from ThinMan.

As mentioned, the aim of Gateway is to make it as easy as possible for IT administrators and remove all headaches and problems, so that they can dedicate themselves to other activities and support their colleagues. Precisely for this reason we suggest ThinMan Hardware Appliance, which can start operating directly on site and allow you to optimize IT processes as a dedicated device and with a specific repository disk, directly in zero-config mode, simply by being connected to the company network if configured for the other Praim products. Automatic mode is also possible for the Virtual appliance, although in this case the IT administrator is required to at least identify a device to host the Gateway and install the new virtual machine.

However, for administrators who like to take care of every detail and perhaps further strengthen security (for example by installing their own company certificates) it’s also possible to proceed with a manual configuration’s customization (necessary in any case for the Software appliance – here is the procedure for Virtual and Hardware).

Using and optimizing ThinMan Gateway

Like any other Praim ecosystem’s component, all Gateways connected to the endpoint infrastructure can be immediately managed in ThinMan. After installation and configuration, the various Gateways are notified to the ThinMan server where they will appear in the Gateways area.

Access a Gateway’s features from the Gateways section of ThinMan

In this section the Gateways status (connected and running, disconnected, waiting for acceptance) can be monitored and recognized at any time and it’s possible to accept new Gateways connected to ThinMan for the first time to take control of them.

View the devices, information and active services of a ThinMan Gateway

From the Gateways section all the instances controlling the respective remote offices are displayed and accessible for management. By selecting a Gateway you can see its details, enabled services and connected devices. In particular, from here it’s possible to modify the configuration, update the component and carry out all other administration and management actions to customize the Gateways’ behaviour. In particular, it’s possible to establish whether they can operate for Power Management (i.e. forwarding Wake On LAN commands) and whether they must host a repository for update packages or firmware images “replicas”.

Set active services and replication properties (package synchronization with ThinMan)

In the Set Services section it’s possible to customize the repository synchronization’s management between ThinMan and each individual Gateway, being able to:

• Set a maximum bandwidth limit (for example to avoid saturating incoming connections to remote offices that rely on limited bandwidth or unstable phone lines).
• Set the server time within which the synchronization of packages and images must be carried out to adapt to the peripheral office’s processes and operational flows. In many cases, in fact, the offices can specialize for specific tasks or operate in different time zones and for this reason it’s advisable not to use network resources and the Gateway during peak times of local activities. Think of the logistics offices, often busy during the night, or the territorial offices and foreign offices (even in other continents) of many companies.
• Specify, both in a general sense (default) and for each individual Gateway, what types of update packages or firmware images you want to replicate (and therefore synchronize) on the Gateways. As soon as a new package of these types is added to the ThinMan repository, it can be replicated on the Gateways respecting the configurations set out above. In the ThinMan repository there will be additional information that will allow you to know whether or not that packet has been synchronized with the Gateways (“Replication Status” information of the individual packet which can be “Pending”, “Replicating”, “Replicated”, “Failed”) .

Set active services and default replicated pack types for all Gateways

Finally, to make administration as easy as possible, a specific section of ThinMan’s General Options dedicated to Gateways and accessible only to the main IT administrator, allows you to specify the Gateways’ default behaviour and to establish which are the active services and synchronization-enabled packet types. These will be the settings applied to the Gateways unless otherwise configured subsequently and can be re-adopted by the individual Gateway at any time (“Load Default Values” option).