Bandwidth Management
Does anyone know of any way to manage bandwidth within PDQ Deploy. I have several locations that I am pushing out updates over T1's. As we all know it is slow and painful and if anyone is onsite it slows there work to a crawl. I would like to see some way to time based manage bandwidth based on remote IP range. For example if my remote office was 1.1.1.1/24 then it would know that the connection was slow and would only try one PC at a time and limit its upload speed to compensate for the lower connection speed.
Right now I am pushing out a required update from a key vendor and it is trying to send to those offices and overloading there end of the circuit. I would honestly love to just get more bandwidth but here in the country that doesn't always happen.
Comments
Do you have file shares in each location? If I were you I would drop the installation file on a share local to each site and set the deployment to use "Pull" instead of "Push". The deployment will kick off, but you'll be sending the file via the local lan and not over the t1 link in that situation.
There's not a good way to manage bandwidth inside of PDQ Deploy itself, it's not a feature at all. You could always make more work for yourself than necessary and do packet shaping elsewhere on your network for it......but I'd start with a Pull type deployment and see where that gets you. You'll have to send the file over the slow link one time to get it on a share, but after that, no more!
I recommend setting up DFS servers. Admin Arsenal has produced several videos about using DFS with PDQ. http://www.adminarsenal.com/videos/#-dfs
Colby, I thought about giving the same advice, but wanted to start small and see if a Pull-type deployment worked a little better. I am in agreement that this would be a great use-case for DFS, but the management overhead of that is rather large, and without knowing his skillset etc, a simple share is much easier to walk someone through while troubleshooting.