arstechnica.com — BitTorrent is often maligned, but overlooking it might be foolish. One IT department found that it can speed patching and image updates so much, that rollouts that once took four days now only take four hours.
Mar 9, 2008 View in Crawl 4
br0pbr0pMar 10, 2008
That's the swamp speed.
avangionqMar 11, 2008
"Apparently, software updates are getting so big these days that simply downloading them from a server is becoming prohibitively time consuming, especially when the same updates need to be applied to many different machines. A Dutch university has some 6,500 desktop PCs in ten locations, which on occasion need to download 3.5GB worth of different types of updates. That's a handsome 22.2TB in total. In a traditional client-server world, that's some modest lifting." ... this is a great idea for the usage of the BitTorrent protocol ... with BitTorrent, the more popular a file is, the easier it is to move the data around ...
redfox2600Mar 11, 2008
Sorry, sorry false alarm.
momsshizzleMar 11, 2008
Lol, being IT admin you should know to never use bittorrent. You must run a mom and pop exchange box.
albinoravenMar 13, 2008
I'm trying to figure out if you used LinuxPE or WinPE to drop Vista as a network boot disk? How did you get around multicast issues or did you enable it? how why who!!!? :)Great job btw.
iteleoMar 15, 2008
There are some points that I want to react on because the title of the article is not very clear:This solution is not updating workstations like WSUS does. In fact we do no distribute any individual update for workstations (yet).We distribute applications that can not be streamed via Softgrid (about 70 MSI's) to the desktop. Beside that we also distribute fresh desktop images. Those Images are about 3.5 Gb in size. This way we are able to update / refresh / migrate large amounts of desktops when this is needed.For all those multicast fans around here:You are absolutly right about the fact that I am consuming more bandwidth compared to the P2P solution. Point is that we consume only 10% (during production hours) from the total available 100 Mbit per desktop. End-users are not bugged during distributions. The desktop is ready to be reinstalled once the image is distributed. From this point the installations are autonomous. A risk less migration compared to multicast solutions. There are far more benefits like being able to deploy applications, totally centralized, WAN bandwidth independence, less risky, AD integration.It's obvious that this whole concept 'has to land' before it will be accepted by the majority. I have no problem with this at all. Some think it' s a brilliant solution while others think I should be fired. Fact is that I have done this project. Projects are done to solve major issues. There were no regular products that could fulfill the organizations demands. It was not my decision to use BitTorrent. I only presented the possibilities, pros & cons compared to other products.INHOLLAND had the guts to go for the P2P solution. Together with the rest of the project team we are very proud about the result. We hope to set a new standard for desktop management solutions. You'll here from us soon!!Sorry designs are not available...:-)