pull fille copy
I just installed the pro version & have been looking at the pull file copy since I have remote locations with 1.5mb lines! The one thing I noticed right away was that there is no option for additional install paths. What I mean is, if I have more many file servers at different locations, how am I supposed to tell pdq to use another server? As it is right now, I can only put 1 path to a server. So if I want to use that installer I literally either have to retype the path or create a separate installer for this to pull the file from the path I want it to?
So if my installer is for acrobat & the install path is \\server1\acrobat, then i have to retype this so it can instead use \\server2\acrobat? I thought when I would click "pull copy" from the installer option that I would be given the chance to add the path that I want it to pull from. So my understanding of this is that if I select pull copy it will only tell the client to pull the files from the path specified in the installer instead of the installer pushing the files to it. So there is no option for me to add additional paths in that installer (or ideally have predefined paths setup that I can select from).
I hope I explained myself well enough to get my point across. This would be a great option to have.
Comments
You are correct that this is a limitation in the current version of the software. Our users who are making the use of this either have file share mirroring so that the same UNC path at different locations will refer to a local server, or are dealing primarily with computers over a WAN.
There are a number of ways to deal with this issue and what we have planned is to allow for environment variables to be used in the paths and then allow for variables to be set for computers (or groups of computers). So that you would use something like "\\%packageserver%\acrobat" and then each computer would go to its specified server. This would also allow for variables to be set on the machines themselves, if users preferred.
We're still working on this feature and would appreciate any additional ideas you might have.
DFS could also provide a solution but not everyone knows how to set it up or have the access rights to do it.
What Citrix does for their Streamed application deployment is to have alternate repository paths that a can be chosen based on different criteria. In this case the most logical one would be based on IP address (subnet) of the target computer(s).
This feature should be built into PDQ deploy.
It is probably the most important feature that is so often totally neglected by deployment software developers.
Regards