Software Deployment

I was able to deploy it by creating an answer file and running setup.exe -s.

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v5r3/topic/rzaij/rzaij.pdf

However, when the user logs in it tells them that an administrator needs to log in in order for the installation to complete successfully. How were you able to work around that?

I created an MSI for V5R3. I used InstallShield's InstallMonitor, and then did fair amount of editting in Wise.

There were a few hoops I had to jump through to get it ready for production. It's definitely not a walk in the park - at least it wasn't like that for me...

I wrapped a legacy installer, as breakl8 suggested, and monitored the installation. One deviation from standard install was forcing dll registration and supression of reboot. Note that IBM uses its own registration module: cwbsreg.exe in order to register pending dlls (the list is provided in the cwbsreg.ini file, which gets emptied after registration). That is what actually requires admin logon in case of a legacy install. I run cwbsreg.exe at the end of legacy install...

Beware of the NetworkProviders key under HKLM\System - if you don't modify default installation behavior, once you uninstall the application, your PC will go into constant reboot loop. In other words, set that key to stay on uninstall.

There are multiple CLSID's that do not get extracted (IBM data providers, mostly). Those can cause data connection issues with 3rd party applications. I exported about 250k worth of .reg file. Not fun to fish for those, believe me.

Also, environment variable PATH gets populated with short pathnames - it did cause issues with 3rd party apps in my case too. Convert path entries to long folder names.

There is a dozen of merge modules available that can be used inside the package - that might help some...

Last, but not least, whether you use snapshots, or install monitoring, you're bound to capture a lot of junk. You can reduce the # of files by filtering out all *.isu files (about 140-150 of those).

Good Luck! Let us know your experience with it...

hello revizor,

we meet again....

With cae 5.2 i had a lot of problems but packaging cae 5.3 with wise i didnt had it at all.
Just capturing with wise (smartmonitor/snapshot), run cwbsreg.exe, exit capturing, finetune the msi (shortcuts etc) and it works like a charm.

Anyone else pakcge this?

Not that the above comments aren't good enough, it's just capturing v5.3 is proving very tricky. Snapshot/Installmonitor seems to capture a load of custom actions which are messing up the install.

Seems like a seriously complicated IBM legacy installer.

At the moment my snapshotted MSI won't install for various reasons. The first one being the signature table having a reference to version 5.0.2314.0 of Internet Explorer, even though my build has v6 on there. Others errors include asking for a strong password. It seems to capture a ridiculous amount of junk.

Any advice?

Sejacru/Revizor!

I see you're logged on!

[:)]

Damn! I knew the new laptop they gave me had a hidden camera...

For what it is worth IBM has created v5r4 using "Windows Installer Technology". Once the exe is uncompressed it has an install msi prebuilt.



http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/access/windows/tech_preview.html

...which would be great IF the MSI included everything which the legacy installer does. Trivial things like Navigator are missing! Next to useless, IMV.

If anyone's interested, I can mail a working WSI to you. It performs a reboot at the end, purely because we found that on our build, although everything worked, things like the log-in dialog box for Navigator took F O R E V E R to load unless we rebooted. Since the client I'm working for deploys via GP, this isn't an important issue. If I had more time, I'd probably be able to work out what the problem is but I have to deliver it in 2 days time.

If anyone can provide me with a rational explanation for IBM's insistence of using a custom EXE for registering its DLLs (the majority have no DLLRegisterServer entry point), I'd like to hear it.

Also, watch out for the registry fix-ups which the vendor install applies: it changes some Prog IDs from those inside the DLL in question. For example, the ProgID in cwbunshf.dll is "IBM.AS400.Network" but the fix-up changes the registry entry to "IBM.AS400.Network.3.7.1". How on earth it all works, God only knows...) I've added a script to the WSI to perform these "fixes", which you're also welcome to.

We have also the R5v4 in production and already made a package for deployment. This is working fine but it needs a restart at the end of the process which I don't want to do.

We are using Microsoft ConfigMgr 2007 for our deployments and OS installations. The problem we have is that we have several applications to install and that the system cannot perform a logon of an administrator so we are looking for a workaround to get rid of this restart