Remote Development

TWalker

Active Member
I am working for a company that has two locations. This is going to put the Enterprise server in one city and the developers in another. They are connected via a T1 line. Does anyone have a similar configuration, and how bad is the checkout/checkin process with this configuration.

Oneworld xe, Sun 3500 w/Oracle 8i, WTS 2000

Tim Walker
Lead CNC Admin
---------------------------------
AHS American Home Shield
850 Ridge Lake Blvd.
Memphis, TN 38120
mailto://[email protected]
 
Utterly awful is the word that springs to mind. I have never seen in on a T1 but on 2Mb pipes I have seen checkins take 45 mins or more. Package deployments are even worse. Latency being the main killer.

Its better to use remote machines: PCDuo, PCanywhere etc etc. I have been on at least five client sites where this has been done, and am currently consulting for a German client and we will be testing thin clients (WinTerm) connected to a portal Citrix WTS which in turn runs remote software to the developer machines. That way we get ICA over the WAN.

Regards

Paul
 
Are the developers going to be the only ones utilizing this connection? check in/out can transfer very large amounts of data at times so having only a t1 (even if it is dedicated to developers) will be painful at times for your developers.
It also depends on the saturation level of the t1 with other applications that may be sharing this connection. If your t1 is already saturated your developers will be absolutely miserable and this can even cause file transfer timeouts/corruption if it gets too bad.
One other question what is your PVC & CIR for this t1 circuit are you utilizing the full t1 or only a portion of it?

B73.3.2 SP 11.1_UPKG, NT, MS-SQL 7.0, WIN2K/Metaframe 1.8a & Fat

Jeff Hill
IS Division Manager
Yamazen Inc.
 
Tim,

You may be able to consider an alternative. It all depends on what you want
to do in terms of development. We have set up a group of PC's that we term
development servers. These are located on the same site as the enterprise
and deployment servers and are accessed through Citrix. The developers are
located at another site with a limited bandwidth. (256k at best) Only one
person can log into each development server at a time. This eliminates the
problems associated with having multiple developers on a Citrix server in
terms of specs contention.

For developing and modifying reports, applications and forms, this has
turned out to reduce the load on the network to the point where the
developers are have no more impact than any other user. Check out/in occurs
on the development server and not to the developers workstation. Only the
OneWorld form and its immediate contents travel on the network.

We have had some problems with BSFN development. The servers sometimes get
confused when trying to locate the directories in the busbuild function.
Other than that we have been extremely successful in our development.

Hope this helps.

Stephen Schofield
Oneworld Support
Aimtronics.
604 723 4736
 
With Xe, why not use Citrix? All you have to do is copy the development
objects and add your developers to the OneWorld Developers group. Just
limit the use of the particular server for development and it will not
impact other users.

Bill Williams

Xe Coexistent with A7.3 Cume 11
Windows 2000 for Citrix and Deployment
 
This is a Corporate line (Full T1 - 1.54Meg). It is being used by the whole
company. I am trying to work out a couple of configurations, but moving the
enterprise server is not an option.
 
Re: RE: Remote Development

Stephen,

I had a problem with SP13 upwards running batch jobs locally on WTS. Basically the backdoor of copy LOCAL to WTSLOCAL no longer works, even with OWDEVELOPER. I even hacked the business function and it didn't do any good. I found a call on KG that said this backdoor had deliberatly closed and wouldn't be opened again. This makes report development a bit difficult.

As I mentioned B4, the sites I was at used PCAnywhere although PCDuo is a bit quicker.

Paul Clark
CNC Technical Consultant
 
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