PWB Over Network

[jpapier]

Greetings,

We've been using PWB v2 for some time now, with very good success. We tried it 1.5 years ago using a single copy of pwb over our Win NT 4.0 network. (Our domain server is NT 4.0, while nearly all of our clients are running Win XP Professional).

PWB seemed "crashy" to us, so we installed the program on individual hard drives. This seemed to help stability.

We've just expanded the library, and doubled the number of PCs. We sure would like to be able to not have to install and maintain PWB on so many machines.

Has the stability of using a single copy of the program to service multiple PCs improved (assuming it wasn't something on our end causing the crashes)?

For around 75 public PCs, could we get away with a single copy, or several copies of the program? What happens if more than one PC tries to open PC over the network simultaneously?

Has anybody had good success in running a single networked copy to service lots of individual PCs?

Any help on this issue would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

JP

[Jaysun]

I did not want to have to maintain individial copies of PWB on each of our ~100 library computers. When running PWB over the network there was a bit of a lag when initially opening the browser that was probelmatic.

My solution was to use a startup script that copied pwb.exe from the server to the local computer whenever the computer was started up. This way all I had to do was update the version of pwb on the server and next time the computers were rebooted they would all have the updated version.

By the way, we use DeepFreeze so that is why the script must run every time the computer starts up.

Hope that helps,

Jason

[jpapier]

A brilliant idea! We certainly had been copying url.txt, etc., locally, but not pwb.exe itself.

And all of PWB's components reside within a single folder, so that makes copying no problem, correct?

We run Deep Freeze as well, btw.

A bow to your ingeniousness,

JP

[spragers]

Hi,

I only have 8 computers to deal with here, but I use the same setup: a startup script copies PWB.EXE and all the related files to the local hard drive from a network drive. That way, I can easily make changes to the PWB configuration, and they take place the next time the computer reboots (which is after each user session).

We had previously tried running PWB over the network, but the response time was just too slow (we also had issues with the various filter and log files). Been up and running this way for a few years now with no major problems.

[jpapier]

Do you guys use the startup script capability which is part of gpedit.msc?

[spragers]

Ours is probably pretty atypical, we have a sign-up system that was develoepd in-house. This is simply launched from the Startup folder, and the log-on program runs the PWB setup script.

I'm sure you could use policies to accomplish that as well, but I have, unfortunately, no experience with the Windows policy editor. I always just go straight to the registry and start hacking away