Hi Tim, My tl;dr below your comment. Also is a somewhat M$$$$$ response. On 9/3/2010 4:29 PM, Tim Wilson wrote: > Hi all, > > My team and I have been exploring the use of bittorrent to distribute > Windows and other updates to the 8,000+ workstations in our school > district. We're about 80% there with a solution, and I'm wondering if > anyone else on the list is doing this. I'd love to have a chat about > how you've implemented it. > > For more info, here are some articles about large organizations using > bittorrent for this purpose: > > http://torrentfreak.com/facebook-uses-bittorrent-and-they-love-it-100625/ > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-Xr_PJdNmQ > > http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/02/10/twitter-turns-bittorrent-streamline-server-updates/ > > http://torrentfreak.com/university-uses-utorrent-080306/ > > Later, > Tim > > -- > Tim Wilson > Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA > Educational technology guy, Linux and OS X fan, Grad. student, Daddy > mailto: timothy.d.wilson at gmail.com aim: tis270 blog: technosavvy.org Hello, Your question probably would be more relevant on the TCSA mailing list, but I will still attempt to answer. I warn this may read like an advertisement for Microsoft products. I have been also looking at different options for Windows patch management as well. So far my best options have been SMS/SCCM + WSUS for Windows based patch deployments for applications and Windows. Since I don't know how your network is configured I will use mine as an example. We have at ~40 satellite offices with one main office. They are all connected via site to site VPN, multiple subsets. The remote offices don't always have a ton of bandwidth, and a good chunk of the time they can be fairly saturated depending on user activity. For really slow offices (and a good few users), we generally place a deployment server (WSUS/SCCM child) directly onto their LAN. In this way patch deployments are downloaded directly to this child (instead of 60+ workstations individually) and deployed from the child. This greatly reduced failure rates for patch deployments, as well as patches that are being deployed when the user arrives for work. SCCM also gives detailed reports of who and what failed/succeeded. SCCM + WUS allows you to schedule your "advertisements" of an update schedule. Allowing say, updates to only deploy at 5:30PM on this upcoming Friday, or anytime thereafter. There is a lot of customization you can make for scheduling/reporting of your deployments. It appears that most of the links that where attached are for deploying updated web code to server farms, which would work great using bittorrent (almost a no brainer) since nothing needs to be done after the fact (except maybe a reload, love you Linux :D ). In windows land, patches would most likely need to be executed in some fashion, and preferably you would need to notified if say 5 machines failed patching, and other reporting. Scheduling is always nice too. I am very interesting in hearing about the 80% that has been completed in your effort, where are you now with this? Assuming this is a public school system, are you able to collaborate with City/State IT personnel? Supporting 8k+ workstations, I tip my hat to you and your team sir. Have a wonderful weekend! ~M