That rsync idea sounds like a good idea, if you were on a high speed LAN. Our remote offices are connected via either frame relay or DSL (VPN). rsync connections would completely saturate the lines, not too mentioned the RAM on the central server.
Eh? Rsync can be told to only change things that are new/changed. So if sending out new/changed stuff would saturate the lines, then whatever you use to do same is going to saturate the lines.
Am I missing something?
Our frame relay connections are usually only 256K or 384K lines. You don't think that 10 simultaneous rsync connections would be too much for this? Yes, we would only be changing new files but rsync would still have to scan the entire disk of the machine each day, that takes time, especially over a fractional T. For example, right now I need to change a Perl script that is on each workstation. The script is a small file, under 50K. It would be much, much faster to simply just copy this file to each workstation then to have each machine doing an rsync scan of an entire disk just so that it can copy a 50K Perl file over. We're talking 10 minutes for the scan, as opposed to 10 seconds to simply copy the file over. Chris