Florian,
Enjoy your beer! I will look at Mark's link (thank you for that) but I
think that you are indeed correct: it appears that a lot of time is needed
for this. And time is one thing that I do not have! My wife and two little
boys actually enjoy me being home! Go figure, right!
Anyway, here is a nutshell is what we are trying to do (with a little
background to give you the context of this 'process'):
1. We sign a new client. They have four servers and 65 workstations. We
need to install our "MyIT" software to those four servers and 65
workstations.
2. Someone from sales generally puts our agent on one of the servers so
that we can poke around and do an assessment (but I digress)
3. When the contract for this client starts (actually, generally a little
bit before - depending on the circumstances), we need to install the agent
on all of the 'computers'
4. The boss wants to - via our MyIT Management Interface - create a 'script'
that can create the Group Policy Object, put the .msi file in a specific
place (shared folder, called \\server1\MyITAgent - we have variables
available to us via the MyIT Management Console so that is not a problem)
and then configure the GPO - via this 'script' - to be linked to the Domain
Level and to deploy the application via the distribution point of
\\server1\MyITAgent$\myitagent.msi.
Does that make more sense? Or, am I failing miserably?
Thanks.
Cary
Post by Florian FrommherzHowdie!
Post by Cary ShultzI am not aware of any way to do this...have looked at Darren's stuff and
at your stuff and at the lovely Lilia's stuff.....just not finding it.
And, I do not know GPOs well enough to do that (better said, do not have
the time....to be honest....to find out if I am good enough!).
I don't believe there's something out there that does that nor do I
believe that searching for that everywhere is worth the outcome (Es lohnt
sich wahrscheinlich nicht, so viel Zeit zu investieren, I'd say). Software
Installation is kind of "special" as there are a couple of files involved.
If you want to go that route anyways, hmm, I'd probably look at Mark's
http://gpupdate.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!95A4CDC36943279A!120.entry --
it describes how you're going about changing the distribution point of
managed software AND gives you a good idea of what files are around and
what to look for. So that would be my way to start.
You'll probably want to create a vanilla software package and all that and
track/audit the changes GP does to SYSVOL and the directory. After that,
sneak into the files create (*.aas, ...) and see what it does. But then
again, I doubt you'll find much to do in reasonable time as you'd have to
programmatically implement that rather than easily "script" it.
I'm curious as to what you're trying to automate here. I couldn't figure
that out from just reading your posting. What I try to do is
customize/tailor down software packages as far as I can. ORCA helps you
customize MSIs. I kind of build three/four versions of an MSI/MST for
deployment and just throw them on customer's distribution points. I do the
customization on the package rather than the GPO, if possible.
Post by Cary ShultzIch bedanke mich im voraus und verbleibe (I loved writing that in
e-mails when I worked in Germany...that is a cool sentence!)......
Haha, that is a fun sentence. You rarely read that unless you're having
email conversations with federal agencies or officials.
Ich werde mir jetzt ein Bier genehmigen.
Have a good day, Cary :)
Florian