Cygwin provides a rather unique, and sometimes inconvenient, mechanism for installation. A small network-install executable is provided, which consults online repositories for downloads of installation artifacts. The install executable also relies on locally-written meta-data to keep track of the entire installation footprint.

Cygwin makes a particularly powerful solution for a client-side agent in providing central command-n-control with a centralized backup/archival system. Here are some details around how Albert Lea Data has devised such a solution.

• Create an administrative user for the backup system identity to be used, log in as that user
• Acquire the ZIP archive to the client machine
• Extract the contents of the ZIP archive to a working location
• Move the cygwin64 folder extracted from the ZIP archive to suitable destination (d:\\ recommended)
• Edit the .reg files extracted from the ZIP archive to ensure path references are corrected
• Right-click on each .reg file and

This is the recipe for how the client-side agent footprint is bundled, and how to go about upgrading it.