Per User installation needs to be changed to Per Machine
Hey all,
I have given myself a mental cramp over this so I thought I would turn to you folks to see if you had any ideas. We are a Novell shop and we distribute our Wise created MSI's via Zenworks. We have an installation of Novell Groupwise that was mistakenly done as a Per-User MSI, and exists on our clients in most but not all profiles. We would like to roll out a new version of GroupWise, but this time with a Per Machine installation.
The trouble comes in when we have more than one profile with the per-user installation. In our environment we may have user A, user B, and user C. Say user A and B have the per-user installation, but user C has nothing. We send this out and it may drop on user C....ideally we would like to have it only drop once, on user C, and have it remove the installations on user A and B, while putting down the Per-Machine installation for all. I can drop the new per-machine installation, and I have an embedded script in there to remove the per-user installation for that profile (suprisingly ,we found we cannot use an upgrade code from the per-user install inside the per-machine install...its ignored), but when another user logs on we get a kind of self-healing h*ll. I have also messed around with the spooky MSIZAP utility from Micro$oft, but it obviously cannot remove the per-user installed keys without loading the hives from all the user profiles. This is possible but by no means easy...and there are a lot of moving parts to make that work. The more I pound my face into the keyboard the more I think that someone else has been in this exact same spot and must have come up with a more feasible solution.
I have also considered dropping the MSI on each user that logs on, and just setting REINSTALL and REINSTALLMODE properties to have the MSI yank out each per-user installation, but that is not ideal. Ideally, we would like to remove every per-user installation from the machine and put down the new per-machine installation in one shot...
Any ideas, tools, rants, or chuckles are welcome.
Thanks,
Kneedle
I have given myself a mental cramp over this so I thought I would turn to you folks to see if you had any ideas. We are a Novell shop and we distribute our Wise created MSI's via Zenworks. We have an installation of Novell Groupwise that was mistakenly done as a Per-User MSI, and exists on our clients in most but not all profiles. We would like to roll out a new version of GroupWise, but this time with a Per Machine installation.
The trouble comes in when we have more than one profile with the per-user installation. In our environment we may have user A, user B, and user C. Say user A and B have the per-user installation, but user C has nothing. We send this out and it may drop on user C....ideally we would like to have it only drop once, on user C, and have it remove the installations on user A and B, while putting down the Per-Machine installation for all. I can drop the new per-machine installation, and I have an embedded script in there to remove the per-user installation for that profile (suprisingly ,we found we cannot use an upgrade code from the per-user install inside the per-machine install...its ignored), but when another user logs on we get a kind of self-healing h*ll. I have also messed around with the spooky MSIZAP utility from Micro$oft, but it obviously cannot remove the per-user installed keys without loading the hives from all the user profiles. This is possible but by no means easy...and there are a lot of moving parts to make that work. The more I pound my face into the keyboard the more I think that someone else has been in this exact same spot and must have come up with a more feasible solution.
I have also considered dropping the MSI on each user that logs on, and just setting REINSTALL and REINSTALLMODE properties to have the MSI yank out each per-user installation, but that is not ideal. Ideally, we would like to remove every per-user installation from the machine and put down the new per-machine installation in one shot...
Any ideas, tools, rants, or chuckles are welcome.
Thanks,
Kneedle
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Posted by:
cdupuis
19 years ago
*chuckle*chuckle*
Good Luck...
Have you checked to see whether or not just removing the policy forcing the per-user install then re deploying it per-machine will install overtop of the original install and change the settings files/registry entries to allow it to function for all users?
Good Luck...
Have you checked to see whether or not just removing the policy forcing the per-user install then re deploying it per-machine will install overtop of the original install and change the settings files/registry entries to allow it to function for all users?
Posted by:
kkaminsk
19 years ago
Ow... That is not a preferred situation but ZenWorks can dance around it (sorta). You could use MSIZAP (should work) to nuke the per-user install GUID and info out of the user profile then make a script to nuke the application off the system as say a pre-distribution script for the upgrade. Then the upgrade can install everything as a per-machine install. Unforuntately that will not remove the per user registry settings. A logon script or putting a custom EXE in run once may help but you may be able to get away with the new version just writing out the registry over the old data in HKCU. I am sure the vendor would never want you to do any of this.
Posted by:
fetgor
19 years ago
oops, I Think you have to phase out old packages, cant you uninstall Grourwise package 1.0 ant the in the GroupWise package 1.1 (chage ALLUSERS=1) generate a new Product and package code?, and then distribute this?? - just an idea
/Göran
/Göran
Posted by:
kkaminsk
19 years ago
I also found the Windows Installer Cleanup utility by accident. It might be more useful than MSIZAP but I have never used it.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290301
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290301
Posted by:
batroja
19 years ago
How are you going to handle the per user registry entries for Groupwise and Windows messaging? Someone jump in here if I am misstaken but even per machine installations do not update the default user profile or does WISE have a tool to do that?
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