24 hours should be plenty of time for any computer with an always-on or on-demand connection to run its course and update automatically.
Here's a suggestion for modem users: since during CASP season we know when updates will be, why not add a feature that could schedule an upload? Most modems are or can be confgured to dial when some application requests a net connection. Alternately this could even be added to DFgui rather than the client itself, since the ability to manually upload is already there.

Originally posted by Scoofy12

As for large farms killing bandwidth, I still think it would be a neat idea to have the ability to get the update from some sort of local proxy. Maybe you could have the client check wherever it normally does for updates, if there was an update, the server could give the client a filename of a separate file (signed and all) that the client would look for, by default on the DF site, but alternately on a user-configurable location. It should be secure enough to be workable because of the signed-update architecture. You can do that during all that free time you must have in your cushy job :bs:

Perhaps to elaborate on this a bit: For security reasons I think the master location checked by the client to see if there are any updates available should remain the same, the distributedfolding.org servers. However, there could be a proxy server. This proxy server could, periodically or manually, check for updates. If found it could download an update from the master, or even from another proxy. Then, when clients find that there is an update, rather than downloading it from df.org, they could instead check a (user-configurable) proxy location, and download the (signed) update, thus conserving bandwidth over any kind of shared line.
Likewise, they could maybe even upload WUs to this proxy, which could then queue them for sending to DF, either manually or at a scheduled time. This wouldn't be very difficult especially considering that there are no unique WUs to download to clients.


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