Speeding up Cygwin deployment

[Larry Hall (Cygwin)]

Vinod K Gupta wrote:
> I  need to deploy cygwin and some addon software on about 100 Windows XP Pro machines in my department. It is taking about an hour to setup one machine. I thought of speeding up deployment by setting up one reference machine with all the packages customized to our needs, make a zip archive of C:\cygwin along with a couple of registry entries in cygwin.reg script and take it on a USB key to the target machine. It seems to be working except that I have not gained the anticipated speed, and thus this posting.
> 
> It took me only a minute to create a 180 MB archive from a 450 MB source using Windows builtin zipper (WinExplorer's Send to...zip) but unzipping on target is painfully slow (about 45 minutes). Yes, my anti-virus is temporarily turned off. I see that it is spending 90% of the time in those folders which have symlinks. In addition, there are some other interesting observations. To make the point clear I take example of two files:
> 
> C:\cygwin\usr\share\man\man1\allec.1
> C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\lib\X11\doc\html\atobm.1.html
> 
> Cygwin's ls lists both files as symlinks
> WinExplorer lists allec.1 as shortcut and atobm.1.html as a normal file
> DOS' dir does not list atobm.1.html at all.
> 
> I tried using stand-alone zip/unzip utilities from popular http://www.info-zip.org
> "zip.exe -rq0! cygwin.zip cygwin" is blazingly fast to create archive (1 minute, great it allows no-compression option)
> 
> Unzipping by info-zip's unzip.exe was very fast (5 mins), preserved allec.1 as symlink but atobm.1.html was missing.
> 
> Unzipping by WinExplorer was slightly faster (still 30 mins!), preserved allec.1 as symlink but atobm.1.html was missing. 
> 
> So, the only thing that works is to use WinExplorer to zip and unzip but it does not serve the primary goal - deploy cygwin on 100 machines within 5-10 minutes per machine.
> 
> Any ideas?


Yes.  You're better off setting up a package server.  See:

<http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin-apps/package-server.html>

 From this you can control the packages installed but can use 'setup.exe' to
install, which understands how to unpack packages, symlinks, and run
postinstall scripts.  Also, you'll have a server from which to roll out any
updates conveniently.


-- 
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
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