[wpkg-users] WPKG and WOL (WAS: Re: Global max execution time hardcoded?)

[Mike Reardon]

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 10:58 AM, G.Ott <gerdott at taz.de> wrote:

>
> Hi,
> As the discussion already widened the topic a bit, I would propose to
> ask the community how they actually use wpkg.
> Perhaps a doodle would make sense here too.
>
> I would be interested to know if and which client is used and when
> software is installed via wpkg.
>
> We have only about 80 clients here, mostly XP, a few win7 in a Samba3-
> Domain.
> I use wpkg-client on shutdown and it works fine.
>
> Some machines are switched off for a longer time and here as well, WoL
> doesn't work in about 10% of the cases.
>
> So I would like to have the possibility to run wpkg both on startup and
> on shutdown: Usually new software-packages are deployed during working
> hours, so users are not annoyed by long startup-delay, when sw is
> installed on shutdown. But updates still would be installed, even if a
> machine was turned off for a longer time.
>
> Regards,
> Gerd
>

I'm the network administrator for a school district in the Canadian Arctic
managing 900 workstations in 9 sites spread over 8 communities.  These
sites are separated by either microwave or satellite links.  We're using
WPKG to manage all of our software installs.  We are using the regular WPKG
client (1.3.14) and it runs on system startup.  We do use WOL to wake up
our workstations at 2am as well as a scheduled task in windows to force a
restart on workstations that aren't sitting on a staff member's desk.

As our WAN links are extremely slow, I have a master WPKG location where I
do all of my updating to the packages, and each site has a local fileserver
that pulls in the changes each night via rsync.  The WPKG client is
installed by Windows Deployment Services when the systems are imaged, and
the proper SOFTWARE variable for the local fileserver is set based on IP
range checks in the package definition for the WPKG Client.

Some of our workstations do travel from site to site, so there is a GPO
attached to each site in ActiveDirectory that runs a script on bootup to
set the SOFTWARE variable to the correct one for that site.



Here is a map of where my network is located:
https://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?msid=212724386134976785115.0004d9a317c4858b2e396&msa=0&ll=69.349339,-131.352539&spn=13.26204,57.084961
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