Jon Carnes wrote:
>
> A simpler solution is to use disk imaging. If you are truly making
> all the boxes with the same technology then a disk image of the
> current best-of will due the trick. Then you can send around a new
> CD every week with the new image. Just use a boot disk and then
> DD the new image on to the drive.
We've considered burning our own CDs, and probably will at some point,
however this would generally be a pain. Then we'd have to walk some
probably untrained individual in the stores through putting the CD in on
each PC and going through the DD process. This would be very time
consuming on a weekly basis and a nightmare even if scripted.
Additionally we'd almost definitely get confusion about which version of
CD and/or floppy's to use because someone didn't throw out the old one.
Believe me, think of the worst and it happens. Many if not most of our
stores don't have any computer savy individuals. Finally though it is
cheap, it isn't very cost effective compared to the alternative I was
asking about.
> On a different track you could place the image somewhere on the net
> and let each site download it.
Well, this is really the same but reverse of the scenario as I was
saying before. We'd still end up downloading 140mb to each store to do
an update. Over a 56kb (which we could update our frame links to) this
would still kill us since these links need to be active for other
resources as well. Yes, bandwidth is cheap, but not that cheap when you
have 100s of sites that need to reliably be online 24 hours a day.
In all honesty, and this is true even over the Internet, it seems silly
to have to transfer the entire RPM when effectively you've only changed
a couple of files. A patching system would be a big win for Linux.
Solaris supports it and so does Microsoft to some extent (only because
they really don't really have a packaging system, but...).
So, does this exist for Linux?
- Matt
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