[wpkg-users] Bandwidth Limiting

[Natxo Asenjo]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 11:11 PM, Terrell, Trey
<Trey.Terrell at oregonstate.edu> wrote:
> Howdy folks. While working on getting WPKG all set up my administrator
> requested a feature that is apparently available in SCCM but not with this.
> We’re thinking about moving application deployment over to WPKG due to the
> simplicity, so that future employees (student employees) will be able to
> easily pick it up and continue it. When a new update comes out we need some
> method of limiting the bandwidth of the transfer to those computers, so it
> won’t slow the entire network down. If we need to push (via sending every
> online computer a command) an important update it’ll drain our network
> significantly for as long as it takes everyone to update. The only thought
> was that if we can’t figure out throttling then we need some sort of method
> of grouping hosts and only doing 20 or so at a time. Doing that manually
> with the web interface would be awful (unless I change it, which I may have
> to do), so I was hoping you’d all have some ideas. (Just a side note – we’re
> talking hundreds of computers here. Hence the awful.)

I am not managing so many workstations (we use mostly thin clients and
citrix servers). But we do have quite a few and I have yet to see
something like this. Our wpkg share is in a data center and we have
100Mbit to our main office. I can tell you that no I can see nothing
shocking in the network graphs when I use wpkg or do unattended
several simultaneous installations of windows + wpkg from that
connection.

We do not use the web interface of wpkg (I did not know it had one!),
but in the rare occasion I need to push something to the wpkg managed
hosts I just use psexec (sysinternals) to restart the wpkg service on
each of them. You can write the names/ip addresses in a file and run a
for loop on that file from cmd.exe so you do not need to enter the
commands yourself every time.

Anyway, if you really need to throttle the downloads, then you can use
robocopy from the windows resource kit. It has a flag /ipg:n where n
is the number of milliseconds to wait after every packet.. You could
also use bitsadmin (from the support tools). Bitsadmin uses BITS, the
same protocol used by the windows updates. Both tools require some
learning, though.

-- 
natxo