CQC Automated/Distributed Upgrade

[wuench]

Since CQC is distributed, I have it running on 5 different machines (two XP VM's and 3 WIN7 clients).  With the furious pace of CQC beta releases recently (and me having to keep up this round for driver development) I have been spending a lot of time doing it all manually.   I had to copy the file, unzip it on every client and install it.  Then clean up each system the way I like it, sometimes restarting apps, and deleting the Start Menu shortcuts.
 
Long story...short, I decided to spend the last week developing a way to automate my CQC install using AutoHotKey and EventGhost across all my machines.  What seemed like a simple project, turned out to get a little deep but in the end I came up with the following solution....  But now all I have to do is drop the zip file onto a specific file share and 15 minutes later everything is done.
 
Here is the video:

 
The How-To is on the CQC forum...here

 

[dgage]

Wuench,

What is the advantage of having CQC distributed. I currently have CQC running in one VM but could do more if it made sense, especially for fault-tolerance. Thanks.

David

 

[wuench]

There's really aren't fault tolerance type of benefits, just convenience.  I basically have 2 VMs running the service itself, the master server is in it's own VM.  The other is a second VM (CQCDB) running the SQL database for the DatalogDB driver.   I separated them because I didn't want to drag down the master server with all the SQL stuff.  
 
The rest of the machines are really just clients, where I load the client tools and sometimes the TrayApp for app control.  I load that on my HTPC to control XBMC.
 
A lot of people run touchscreens and, since CQC can't be run at different versions, they need to upgrade those and usually have to do it with limited access as they are often stripped down.  Hopefully this install script will benefit them as well.
 
But yeah, there's no reason to do it unless you have a good reason.....

 

[dgage]

Thanks for the explanation. I guess I'll stick with all-in-one for the moment but its good to have options. And thanks for sharing your solution.

David

 

[Dean Roddey]

If you have a larger system, distribution of load is a primary reason. You could move the RIVA server to another machine dedicated to servicing clients if you had a good number of them, for instance. If you were driving a lot of drivers, you might host those on a separate machine from the MS. Particularly if you were, say, driving 8 audio zones using our headless audio player, maybe you might want to move that to a separate machine to keep that load off the MS, which can otherwise be fairly small and kept quite separated from everything else.
 
Anyhoo, that sort of thing.