Fellow monks,

I'm slowly but surely spreading Perl at work - people see that I solve problems quickly using it, and ask to get it too. Others have to use programs I write so they install it. But I'm getting tired of installing Perl on all my co-worker's computers. I want to make a centralized installation in some common file system - this will also give me the benefit of installing all the modules from CPAN I use in one place. Two problems make my life harder:

  1. No unix - all the machines are Win 2K, the network is also Windows based. But we *do* have shared drives on the network.
  2. No internet connection - yep that's right, don't ask why. Our intranet is not connected to the outer world.

So, my plan of attack is as follows:

First I install the latest ActivePerl on a central drive that's accessible by everyone, say mapped to "S:". Then, I get minicpan from the internet, burn it on a CD and use it do install CPAN modules in my Perl installation space.

Since it's Windows and I want to use modules with C integration, I'll have to install nmake and the command line compiler of MS Visual 6 to compile stuff.

So, using these tools I'll install all the modules I need in S: and add perl to people's PATHs, and also to their %INCs.

The users' machines will load the perl executable from S: with all its modules and run it in memory so no performance problems bar some startup delay.

For laptops and PCs unconnected from the intranet, I'll use PAR to package stuff and run it stand-alone.

Anyone done anything similar ? Impressions ? Perl is a great tool and people recognize it - making it easy to deploy and use on "non friendly" networks will make it even more popular.

In reply to Deploying Perl centrally in a Windows-based intranet by spurperl

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