VMTools have always been a real pain to install. I think they had a college intern write their installer because none of the other developers wanted tool.

Heh.. interesting

VMTools have always been a real pain to install. Really? I must have installed various versions of it at least 40 times on different hosts/VMs, each time without incident.
I'm trying to understand if there is a good reason why the files being used wouldn't have been included inside the MSI's binary table instead? You mean embedded CABs, not the Binary table. It's always a toss-up for a packager: embedded or external CAB(s) or external, uncompressed files. Sometimes, it's the client's call. At my current client, we tend to restrict MSIs with embedded CABs to 50Mb. Anything bigger and we go external.

Hey VBScabb,

When you tell WPS to copy files to a location, does that not write a binary stream to the install database? Or does it actually create a CAB file and then write to the database? The VMWare install has several uncompressed files that it uses.

As for your client's rule to limit embedded CABs to 50 MB, is that for performance reasons?

I'm not that familiar with the process flow but yes, the embedded CAB is a binary stream but it's not stored in the 'Binary' table.

As for the 50Mb limit, I have no idea why it exists but, guessing, I'd say yes, the client wants to avoid enormous MSIs being copied into the local cache before installation, particularly for remote sites which aren't on fast links.

ORIGINAL: VBScab

I'm not that familiar with the process flow but yes, the embedded CAB is a binary stream but it's not stored in the 'Binary' table.

As for the 50Mb limit, I have no idea why it exists but, guessing, I'd say yes, the client wants to avoid enormous MSIs being copied into the local cache before installation, particularly for remote sites which aren't on fast links.


Ahh.. I thought that it got written to the binary table. Wonder where the embedded CAB actually goes.

theres a few hidden tables like _Streams etc which store that kinda stuff.

ORIGINAL: jmcfadyen

theres a few hidden tables like _Streams etc which store that kinda stuff.




Aaaaaaah good to know thanks.