Service Pack deployment through Group Policy

[Chris Coates]

We are using Group policy to deploy SP4 to our Win 2000 clients.
Group Policy is doing an excellent job of deploying and there have been no
Group Policy related issues.
The server that the install files reside on has a 100mb network connection
and most clients have 10mb connections.
We have been selecting groups of 50 users each night and telling them to
reboot their PCs when they leave. The Service Pack automatically installs.
All 50 of those users reboot at about the same time. There have been no
issues, and I want to increase the number of users rebooting each night.
Are there any recommendations as to how many users should be configured for
something like this before there are significant slow downs and installs
time out and fail?

Thanks

(e-mail address removed)

 

[Helgi B.]

Think the best way to find the answer to that is to just try more users
every night But I use SUS for this purpose, works really well for SP4 as
well as patches in general and it uses the BITS service to only take up idle
bandwidth. I used to deploy SPs using GPs but find SUS easier and a more
logical choice. Take a look at
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...e4-6e41-4f54-972c-ae66a4e4bf6c&DisplayLang=en

Helgi

 

[Torgeir Bakken (MVP)]

Think the best way to find the answer to that is to just try more users
every night But I use SUS for this purpose, works really well for SP4 as
well as patches in general and it uses the BITS service to only take up idle
bandwidth.

Hi

Note that for the idle bandwidth part, BITS have no idea about the
network traffic on the LAN/WAN, it only cares about the network traffic
on the local computer. So if no other process on the computer is using
any network bandwidth, BITS is using whatever network bandwidth it is
able to get.