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Do you need more granular bandwidth throttling and scheduling for ZCM (ZENworks Configuration Management) content replication? Perhaps this alternative will work for you.

As a workaround until ZCM receives more granularity for scheduling and throttling of content replication, consider using ZENworks Server Management TED (Tiered Electronic Distribution) to distribute content. TED has very configurable throttling and content scheduling.

The Basic Steps

1. Use ZCM to create application bundles with Install Actions of Install Network MSI.
2. Use TED to distribute the MSIs to a device (workstation or server) at the remote site that offers a network share (Windows networking, NCP, Samba, etc.) to the end user workstations.
3. Set the Install Network MSI actions to install the MSI from the drive letter on the end user workstations that you've mapped to the local share.

Some additional things to complete the process:

4. Create a System Requirement for each app bundle that looks for the existence of "distributed.txt" in MSI's folder on the network share. This ensures that the icon doesn't show up on the workstation before the content is fully distributed to the TED Subscriber.
5. Create a Post-Distribution Script for each TED Distribution that creates the file "distributed.txt" in the newly-distributed MSI's folder using the Subscriber's OS CLI echo/pipe or copy commands.
6. A ZCM Satellite works well as the TED Subscriber. You could even have the Content Role enabled on the Satellite for replicating small content that doesn't need to be scheduled or throttled. If the Satellite is XP, be aware of the maximum 10 concurrent connections of Windows networking.
7. An existing remote office NetWare or OES-Linux server should also work well as the Subscriber.

Additional Considerations

Benefits of this approach:

• Could use the existing server and/or ZSM TED infrastructure.
• Less overhead required on the ZCM server.
• Potentially faster.
• SAN devices could be used to deliver content, which could reduce the number of ZCM servers required to handle load.
• If you use other methods to deliver applications in addition to ZCM, there is no need to duplicate content distribution for devices not managed by ZCM.

Drawbacks:

• ZCM does not control the distribution of the application content. This has to be managed outside of ZCM.
• ZCM has no control over who has access to the data.
• Application data is not encrypted and can potentially be installed by anyone with access to the server.
• Outside the firewall, VPN access is required in order to deliver applications.

Thanks to Oscar Sanchez and Craig Wilson for their assistance.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.