XP remote deployment over WAN links

I've done it over a fast business class DSL service over off peak so I don't kill the network during the day. That is, I send images over to their local file server. I do not try to ghost directly on to the machine. That would not be wise. Always have some kind of local file/AD server if possible.

to the point where that remote site lost connectivity from the entire WAN and servers were losing replication traffic left and right. The genious(sarcasm) administrator decided to image 100 PCs' all at the same time over a fast ethernet LAN using a Ghost mutlicast server, flooding all the network switches with multicast traffic. The flood stopped all other ethernet packets from reaching the servers, effectively creating a denial of service attack on that local subnet. If you're going to image PCs' over a WAN, I suggest you have ample bandwidth to do it so as not to choke other traffic on it, and do a few at a time and not all machines at once. An even easier approach is to burn a syspreped image of the O/S onto a CD and ship the CD to the site where the image needs to be installed. There is more than one way to get an image on a PC, and doing it over a slow WAN is not one of them...trust me.

There is a Riverbed-sponsored online user forum at www.wdsforum.org where users are discussing a variety of topics involving WAN optimization and application acceleration.

Optimizing the deployment of software builds over the WAN is one of the many use-cases where a WAN optimization solution shines.

Bob