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Best and Worst software you have managed?

What is the best and worst vendor provided software you have had to manage in the past year? Why?

I nominate Cisco CTIOS 7.5 as the worst piece of software to come my way. It was a legacy InstallShield setup 1.2 GB in size including additional legacy InstallShield updates. Repackaging into a final msi of 26Mb. For some reason the vendor thought it best if they deploy an setup.exe installer for each component into the program files folder and all updates backed up all files in new folders in Program Files as well.

The best so far... still waiting for that perfect msi to come my way.

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Answers (1)

Posted by: anonymous_9363 14 years ago
Red Belt
0
Try Oracle Developer Suite and Designer 10gR2. The challenge that the two products present - they're shipped together as a "suite", remember - is the different JREs that their installers requires. Not forgetting that the Setup.EXE in the root folder passes command line switches down to the Setup.EXE in the 'Install' folder which actually does the work (in order to create a response file) except the '-silent' switch...Turns out that all that the higher level stub does is a bunch of compliance checks (which you can comment-out in 'oraparam.ini' anyway) and then shells the 'Install' version. Only slightly infuriating...I've come close to thrashing my screen with my keyboard a few times in the past and this one pushed me to the limit.

BTW, it's always entertaining to see vendor incompetence in action...my VMs use a 'System Managed' paging file, something that this ludicrous installer decided just wouldn't do. I resisted changing it, opting instead to change the size required in the INI from '1535' to '0'. In classic style, the installer showed:

Checking swap space: 0 MB available, 0 MB required. Failed <<<<

Priceless....
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