How best update a running application on a remote machine.

Question

So my build machine spits out a new executable and I would like to update my test machine with the new build. In order to do this I would need to somehow kill the process on the remote machine, copy over the new binary and start it running.

And for some reason pskill and psexec don't work due to some weird IT setup.

What would be a good way to do this?

Answer 1

You could have your executable regularly poll some drop location for the presence of a new version, and when one is found shut down cleanly and pass control to the new version, e.g. using an exec() call.