Connect clients and NoTouch Center

To actually manage clients via NoTouch Center, you need to connect them to your NoTouch Center. No worries, this is simple and can be done in a fully automated way! Before you start however, please make sure your URL Prefix value is set up correctly - please see here: URL Prefix

Communication is done via HTTPS or HTTP. Thus, it all boils down to making NoTouch Center's service URL available to the clients. This can happen in multiple ways:

• The tcmgr host name. This works really well in corporate networks, no matter if small or big. Basically you create a DNS A or CNAME record pointing to your NoTouch Center installation. Any factory-new client or fresh installation will always try to contact "tcmgr". More on that here: tcmgr
• E-mail based management server lookup. If you intend to manage machines in the Internet, such as with home office workers, this is great. It allows end users to simply type in their corporate email address and the management URL will be found via DNS SRV records.
• Workgroup deployment. New NoTouch Clients will try to find a NComputing Virtual Appliance in the same subnet via ZeroConf/Bonjour/Avahi. This feature is intended mainly for very small deployments and test labs when you are not (yet) willing or able to modify their DNS
• Search for client devices. NoTouch Center can search for clients using a proprietary UDP-based discovery protocol.
• Manual entry in First-Time Wizard. see here: NoTouch OS QuickStart#Central Management
• Manual entry in the configuration. Log in to a client's Configuration, navigate to Services -> NoTouch Center and set the "Management URL" parameter.

The mere connecting of client and NoTouch Center does not have an effect on clients' configuration. There is no need to worry that this will change the client's behaviour. Directly after connecting clients to NoTouch Center, it will place the client among the "Unassigned" clients, which means no configuration is done. However, adding clients to a group changes the situation: If you decide to add a client to a group, the client will immediateyl inherit the group configuration and all configuration settings done on the client will be overwritten.

Thus, only clients explicitly (by human action or Autoassign) placed into a group will be configured. Clients configured by NoTouch Center are configured only by NoTouch Center and any local administrator changes are overwritten. However, clients are never placed incidentally into a group: you decide if and how you want to do this: manually or automatically, but it is always your decision.

That said, the tcmgr and workgroup deployment methods together with Autoassign allow for a fully automated rollout without even seeing the First Time Wizard.