Systems Management

Glad to be of some help.

Found a link for you 'How to Deploy a Branch Distribution Point'. You have to setup some protected site boundaries so that only machines on that site use the Branch DP there.

Don't forget to rate a post you might have found useful [;)]

Thanks,

Dunnpy

Blake,

It's not something that I've had to deal with on my SCCM site, as it is well connected without remote offices.

What about installing some Branch DP's on your remote sites? Branch DP's can be installed on any SCCM client machine - including Windows XP Pro machines.

That way you can throttle the BITS to the DP's during core hours to save band-width, but still have a deployment run when you like without hammering your link.

Just thinking aloud - hope it helps,

Dunnpy

Yea, I've already previously modified the BITS setting to throttle it down pretty low. The main problem being that we have many remote locations without a distribution point at that location. I have it throttle down to about 100Kbps, but this can still adversely affect the bandwidth when a hundred or so systems are downloading at this speed in conjunction with normal business activities.

If I could specify different BITS settings based on collection, that would probably solve my problem, because then I could basically throttle it down to practically zero during certain windows, but I don't think this is possible.

Dunnpy, I like your idea of changing the polling interval, and that may somewhat work as well, I was just curious what other people have done in situations where they cannot risk impacting network connectivity adversely. Thanks for your suggestion.

Hmmm, that sounds like a better idea. I wasn't aware that they can be any XP machine with the client can be set up as a DP.

Aside from our large sites, we have probably 30 remote sites with 15-25 PCs, so it would probably be a good idea to do something like that on a dedicated machine. I will start investigating into that possibility. I appreciate your help!

I'm assuming your on SCCM. When you build your advertisment, change the make available to when you want the machines to start downloading the package.

Granted if this time will be different for each collection or subcollection you will need to build a separate advertisement for each time frame.

Blake,

I've got a suggestion - don't know how practical it would actually be...

On the 'BITS' tab of the 'Comptuter Client Agent' you can specify a throttling window for your clients. You may be able to tweak the settings so that it will only download the package to install within your maintenance window.


The only other thing is to specify a different polling schedule for those clients, so the check and download of the package falls inside your window - from the 'Modify Collection Settings' option.

Can't think of anything else...

Dunnpy


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