[wpkg-users] IDEA- company repo

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Steve,

On 17.02.2010 15:41, Steve Romanow wrote:
> I apologize if this is covered in other discussions.  I had an idea that
> I wanted to discuss.  We are just getting started with wpkg, but it
> appears to be the perfect tool for deploying our companies ssh client
> (and config) to remote team members.  The way I am thinking, I would
> like to have a web service exposing these applications so that is say
> userA has putty installed on his workstation automatically, but he is
> using a laptop at home on the vpn, he could explicitly run the job to
> install putty.

Exposing the applications available can be done by a simple web-page for
example. You say the users already use VPN to connect to the company network. So
if somebody at home would like to install software from your repository it is
possible as long as the UNC-paths you're using are available to the client when
running the VPN.

The only difference is that either you need to provide a profile for your
home-users or they just install software by using the /install:<package>
command-line switch. You might provide batch-scripts to invoke WPKG here.
However this for sure only works if the user runs wpkg.js manually with admin
privileges on the VPN host at home.

If users do not have access to SMB/CIFS shares via VPN you might need to use
downloads as already indicated here on the list. Just note that this feature is
not very widely used and might yield other problems.


Actually your home-users might even run WPKG Client on their machines and
synchronize with a specific profile (provided by you) on the server. Just note
that synchronization on startup/shutdown might not work since VPN connection
might be unavailable at this boot stage. So you might have to run the WPKG
service by scheduler or even better by the VPN client when it connects (most VPN
clients I know have such possibilities to perform pre/post-connection actions).

br,
Rainer