Distributing In-House Engineering Code?

caswelmo asks: "My company has recently moved from Solaris workstations to Windows workstations (Ohhh, the humanity). As an engineering focused company, we use our computers to run many in-house (command line) codes to analyze and design our products. We currently use NAS storage to store everything and use batch files and init scripts to run the correct codes over the network. This makes sure everyone is running the latest version. This also stinks. I know this isn't an original problem, so what are some other solutions for rolling out lots of simple codes like this?"

Comments

To SMB or not to SMB..

[Vlad_Drak]

I'll assume speed or CIFS creates the pain..

If you really need the speed, you can push out the code to the client machines and put a system in place to audit the distribution. It can end up being a bitch to maintain depending on how you dist and audit. You can write a script with rsync/robocopy and log errors and fix them or buy a commercial software package and check errors and fix them.

You spend the money to go to Copper Gbit and get some more speed, and keep the code centralized over CIFS. If you only need the stuff over the network for reading and not writing, and your apps don'y play well with CIFS, you could get some iSCSI drivers from MS (they're free) and put a initiator on your NAS box or in front of it, or bridge to it from an iSCSI->FC box. Then have your clients grab the LUN read-only over iSCSI and at least Windows thinks it's a local disk.

YMMV

-Vlad