Regarding placement of the Kix executable..
We have over 300 branch locations, connected using Frame Relay at speeds between 128K and T1. None of the workstations (except for admin systems in the HQ location) has Kix installed locally.
We use my "Kix Universal Logon Script", which uses an INI file to define mappings. There are 18 possible drive mappings that get processed, with an average of 7 actual connected shares. Connections are based on group membership (or non-membership) and OU. One message file is displayed, and three external processes are called - two Kix and one EXE.
On the slowest link speed, all of this processes in 18 seconds or less if the config file is not cached on the local workstation, and under 12 seconds if the file is cached. This includes bringing down the Kix32 executeable (256K), the script (22K tokenized), and the config file (3K). I don't think this is unreasonable performance, although if I still had 33-56K dialup VPN users, I might put Kix32 locally on their laptops.
If you're wondering why I'd cache a 3K file and not the other 278K worth of files, I found that 20-24 reads of the INI file over the WAN link can add 60 seconds to the processing time - far less than copying it to the Temp folder and reading it locally.
Glenn
_________________________
Actually I
am a Rocket Scientist!
