[wpkg-users] A feature request.

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Luca,

luca_manganelli at comune.trento.it wrote:
> The problem is that in ADSL a download could take ages :-( ... in one
> office there are about 100 PCs all with only an ADSL 2MB link! Can you
> think if they shut down all together? :-)

Yes and if you have 10 machines on that DSL line it would take at least 10x the
bandwidth of a single host. So it's anyway quite bad if every host downloads the
package directly via DSL line.


> And there isn't a server to put the package...

Are we talking about private use or some business reason behind? Just buy a
simple Netgear ReadyNAS or Synology NAS device with rsync support and sync your
packages weekly/monthly to that device and have the local machines installing
software from this node (just synchronize your whole WPKG share).

Such a device can be bought for less than $200 and saves you lots of headache
and keeps the DSL line free (only one single upload from your central server
needed). In addition you gain a lot of stability and it's less annoying for
users since the download/install will be quite fast from the local NAS server.


> So the problem could be resolved in this manner:
> 
> - startup script that starts a slow download (like 10 KB/sec) in background
> - at shutdown WPKG installs the package, if the download is completed

I only see one possibility to do it. One might synchronize the whole WPKG share
to the local drive and then execute WPKG completely locally.
For example synchronize \\server\wpkgshare to c:\deployment\wpkg and then have
WPKG client starting wpkg.js from c:\deployment\wpkg.
The synchronization could be done using rsync/cwrsync or (maybe RoboCopy could
work too). Using the --delete-after option of rsync the changes are somehow
"atomic". You might first sync the software directory and then sync wpkg.js and
the XML files. So if it fails (connection interrupted in the middle...) the
local directory (WPKG database) would simply remain untouched.

The synchronization could be executed at startup while WPKG synchronization
could be done at shutdown.

But remember that this still requires each host to synchronize/download the
whole software distribution which puts some load on your DSL line.

I would rather prefer the NAS approach.

br,
Rainer