Has no one ever had this need before or am I just suffering from the African syndrome of severe bandwidth constraints? Comments please people... :)

the priority field has anything to do with replication priority. In the case of what you mention, I would manually distribute the package (via CD\DVD or Robocopy) and once they were prestaged enable the package for distribution to the clients.

I am interested by what you are trying to accomplish, but I'm not positive Altiris can do this natively.

Thanks for the comment Jim. In this instance the CD/DVD route is not an option since the devices I'm using as pkgsvrs don't have CD/DVD drives. As for Robocopy, it is an option, but one would like to avoid such alternatives where you need to rely on external apps to make the main solution work....just more admin nightmares :(

awhile back, and we ended up using a third party solution, because we couldn't reliably predict how the package would get staged.

If not, the packages should be there, only new ones would have the issue replicating, correct? If it is a new one, you could work with the replication properties of the pacakages by changing it from the default of 'all package servers' to the manual selection option. That way you could manually select what packages you wanted to replicate to each box, and pick the order. Very cumbersome, and it would have to be done per package. If you have alot of packages, it might not be worth the effort.

It's possible the ASDK has somethign that might work, I haven't looked at it good enough.

Yes, the issue though is that this is not for a new pkgsvr... The situation was that we had a rather large batch of software that needed to be packaged and synced. Due to time constraints this could not be done before the deployment of the 100 + pkgsvrs we sent out. You mentioned that you used a 3rd party utility in a similar situation. What did you end up using?

we were able to schedule and chunk the traffic to multiple servers. We also used this on new package servers as well.

Thanks Jim. have implemented a test case for this now using RichCopy (Robocopy with a GUI). I seems to work well but I have noted the following:

1) Given that you may have a large number a different packages, the process to go through them and identify by GUID the ones you wish to give priority tends to be rather tedious
2) It's important not to forget (for obvious reasons) to exclude the .xml files in the copy process...did this once!
3) Enabling the agent to sync after the copy process has been completed results in numerous errors appearing in the agent log file on the targeted package server...something to do with operation being suspended...the package then seems to register fine though
4) The speed over a WAN link when comparing the Altiris sync process to the Robocopy process does not seem to be very different
5) The CPU levels when using the robocopy process as opposed to the Altiris process are significantly lower
6) One of the big wins using the robocopy method was found in that the Altiris procedure limits the number of Pkgsvr requests. This limit may be changed, but not without having detrimental effects to the CPU usage on the NS.

Regards
Jacques