Hello!
We are a small company with limited resources, but have offices in six
countries with a main office in New York. We receive a tremendous
amount of materials from our clients on cd in New York, and we need to
distribute them to our outer offices in some easy fashion. We've run
into the following barriers:
1) Making them all available for download all the time would get us
into godzillabytes of storage in a month, so we'd just like to make
them available for download for a little while, let them cut cds
locally, and then take them down.
2) We don't want to count on someone in the outer office to remember to
initiate a download overnight in order to get the files.
3) Since these files are being downloaded (over broadband, yes) from
New York to Europe, the potential for interrupted downloads is fairly
high.
We have envisioned some sort of push or synchronization system whereby
we post the files on a local server, and they are automatically
distributed to machines on the outer offices, or the outer office
machines periodically poll the New York server for changes and get any
new files. Each of these actions would need to happen automatically
at a specified time.
Some factors:
-- The individual files will be of varying sizes, but the total amount
of information will be large. I'm sitting, for example, with an 11 cd
set in front of me that needs to go out. So it would need to be able
to move large amounts of data reliably and unattended.
-- I don't have to install or run any files after they are moved, just
move them like ftp.
-- We'd like the transfers to happen at night, but we don't want to
have to remember to initiate transfers or have them remember to
download, so sending should be automated.
-- Automatic resume would be a must.
-- All the machines involved are Windows.
-- Low cost: We're trying to save money with this system over
shipping physical cds, so I'm looking for a cool hack, it doesn't have
to be super-robust enterprise stuff.
-- Low geek-factor remotely: We could have the outer offices install
ftp servers and such, but that's over their heads and tough for me to
walk them through it, and it raises security issues etc. I was hoping
for something that had a simple install on the remote end and left any
heavy geek stuff to me.
Sooo, like I said I'm looking for cheap/free and/or cool hacks to get
this done, and I'm geeky enough that I could probably script a
solution if someone points me in the right direction. I'm hoping that
there might be tools built into Windows that I could somehow bring
together to get this done.
Thanks!
-- Dave |
Request for Question Clarification by
sublime1-ga
on
30 Jul 2004 21:49 PDT
humptydank...
How about a download controller which can be installed at
all your outer offices, and set to download at the same
time every day? Filenames for the day could be emailed
before close of day, and the downloads set to go during
the night.
For example, if the ftp address was ftp://yourcompanyIP/
you could send the filenames of this.exe and that.zip,
and they could enter the addresses:
ftp://yourcompanyIP/this.exe
ftp://yourcompanyIP/that.zip
...then set the program for autodownload and set the
time for 11pm or so. Download Mage also allows multiple
threads (user defined) for the same file(s), which, on
my system, is set to 4, and effectively quadruples the
speed of the site's bandwidth. It will also autoresume
if interrupted. It's pretty intuitive to configure.
Download Mage:
http://www.dlmage.com/
sublime1-ga
|
Request for Question Clarification by
pafalafa-ga
on
06 Aug 2004 20:42 PDT
Dave,
Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but it seems to me you could just
email the files using this service here:
https://s2.yousendit.com/default.uplx
Yousendit is a free service, and will store as much as 1 gig per email
for seven days--your remote offices are notified by email as new files
are posted for download.
Not fully automated, but it seems pretty foolproof just the same.
Like I said, maybe Im oversimplifying...then again, maybe not. Have a
look and let me know.
pafalafa-ga
|
