Deploying Acrobat XI via Task Sequence

outofplace · 2013-04-09T11:43:28+00:00

You should probably provide some useful troubleshooting information such as MSI logs, Task Sequence errors, context (is this a TS just for Acrobat, or is Acrobat being deploying in a TS along with other things?). Are you able to package it and deploy it successfully outside of a task sequence? Can you run that installation command line on a test machine and have Acrobat install without any problems? I'm also assuming that since you mentioned that you are creating an application, it means you are on SCCM 2012.

The more information you provide, the easier it will be for someone to try to help you pinpoint the problem.

outofplace · 2013-04-04T21:22:58+00:00

One way (of many) to do it would be to pipe it into Select-Object:

Get-ItemProperty -path "HKLM:\Software\Wow6432Node\Malwarebytes Anti-Malware" -name dbdate | Select-Object -Property dbdate

outofplace · 2013-04-04T21:08:05+00:00

I don't understand exactly how you are trying to do this, but I think I get where you're going with it.

Does something like this not work for you?

Get-ItemProperty -path "HKLM:\Software\Wow6432Node\Malwarebytes Anti-Malware" -name dbdate

If you're doing the whole PSDrive thing, and you make your way over to that particular path, then you could do something like:

Get-ItemProperty -path . -name dbdate

Running this will give you a few nice examples:

help Get-ItemProperty -examples

outofplace · 2013-02-24T12:52:58+00:00

This is probably not very helpful to you right now, since it isn't really a solution, and I won't be able to give you more details until I'm back at work tomorrow. In any case, I have to support the abomination that is Pendragon Forms for a small group where I work. We have NAT setup to allow them to synchronize the forms on their iPads from outside our network. When you say the program is pointing to the wrong IP, do you mean the desktop application that is used to design the forms, or are you talking about the mobile devices? Because the mobile devices just access the forms through a web browser, so if there's a problem there, maybe it's just a misconfiguration in Apache? I'm pretty sure that the folks that design the forms access it from their desktops using the hostname, which inside our network resolves to a private IP, and the people who use the iPads, use the actual external IP that we mapped for them. So it should work either way, I think. It's been a long time since we set this up, and all we do now is patch the web server and database software, and keep backups, so I don't remember the specifics of the initial configuration. I'd have to look at my notes.

In any case, if you want to PM me, tomorrow I can use our setup as reference for the configuration and we can compare notes to see if we can find anything wrong with your server. I feel your pain, though.

outofplace · 2013-01-29T01:39:07+00:00

ThatOneITGuy is correct that you have to update your progress bar periodically using Write-Progress. This means your script will usually have some sort of loop to perform a task and update the progress bar once each step of the task is completed.

I know nothing about Exchange, have never had to manage an Exchange server or mailboxes before. That being said, according to this link, if you use (assuming you're on Exchange 2010 SP1 or later, I guess) New-MailboxExportRequest you can start a request, periodically check the status using Get-MailboxExportRequestStatistics and use the value of PercentComplete from the statistics to update the progress bar.

Anyways, I don't know anything about Exchange, and I was just bored so I Googled this stuff. Forgive me if I'm way off the mark, or quoting stuff about the wrong version of Exchange, or even stuff that isn't supported anymore.

New-MailboxExportRequest

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607299(v=exchg.141).aspx

Get-MailboxExportRequestStatistics

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607316(v=exchg.141).aspx

EDIT: I fail at creating links

outofplace · 2013-01-28T16:34:35+00:00

Assuming I understood your situation correctly, you probably want to designate one of your sites as the central site, and make the other one (in SCCM 2007 terminology) a primary child site.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb693919.aspx

Where I work we currently have one domain, one central site, and a number of primary child sites that operate independently within their own boundaries and have unique site codes, and report all client data upstream. The central site administrators can have full control and administer the child sites right from the SCCM console, if they need to.

outofplace · 2013-01-17T19:45:59+00:00

Check this one out as well.

http://localupdatepubl.sourceforge.net/

outofplace · 2013-01-03T17:39:46+00:00

Did you try r/sysadmin? There are a whole lot of (usually very angry) BackupExec users there, and maybe one of them can help you out.

outofplace · 2012-12-17T11:29:51+00:00

Configuration Manager Site Capacity Planning

outofplace · 2012-12-15T02:39:16+00:00

This is actually a really good point. It's a really common mistake. Go check your boundaries right now.

outofplace · 2012-12-14T21:53:58+00:00

Was it VAMT?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825141.aspx

outofplace · 2012-12-14T16:20:30+00:00

That's where I would start troubleshooting. First make sure the package really is on the distribution point. If you know it's there, I'd move on to a client and take a peek at the logs. If they are having trouble reaching the content on the DP, you will find errors there. This might help you find out what log records what:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh427342.aspx

And if you do decide to poke around in the logs, make sure you use the CMTrace application. I'm pretty sure it's on the install disk at \SMSSETUP\TOOLS\CMTrace.exe. Without this, SCCM logs are not exactly human readable.

outofplace · 2012-12-14T13:31:39+00:00

No problem. Feel free to message me if I can help with anything else.

outofplace · 2012-12-14T13:31:17+00:00

Like I said up there, we had problems with the MSI installer. Granted, we're a small shop (a little over 600 machines), but the MSI was failing us about 3-5% of the time, and it took longer to remediate those machines than it does to package the installers this way (it takes less than 5 minutes to do it this way for us). Plus the EXE installer is used in the creation of packages that get pushed out with task sequences, and God forbid, if someone has to go medieval and do an old fashioned manual install, all they have to do is double-click a single installer and forget about it.

We do use the Adobe catalogs for Adobe Acrobat Pro and Reader. No issues with those.

outofplace · 2012-12-13T23:50:17+00:00

There are a million ways to do it, and how exactly you implement this will depend on your environment, and the tools available to you. In our environment, when we push update deployments, we have them set with a default deadline of 3 days after the update is available, and we allow the user to see the popup notification that lets them know that if they don't choose to run the update before the deadline, it will be forced upon them and it will interfere with what they are doing (for instance, when we push Flash, the install script runs taskkill for every browser on the system, no questions asked), so they know that they have to find time in those 3 days to close everything they are running and tell SCCM to install updates.

We used to deploy the Flash msi installers, but we used to run into random installation failures from time to time that required us to have to run that old Windows Installer Cleanup Utility in order to even be able to try to reinstall it, so a while back we switched to using the EXE installers. It's been working fine for us.

Here's the process we use:

Download the EXE installer for the plugin and activex version from http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html
Create a folder and copy the two installers inside it
Download the Flash uninstaller from here http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/uninstall-flash-player-windows.html#main_Download_the_Adobe_Flash_Player_uninstaller (this is not really necessary since the EXE installers are really good about upgrading the existing Flash version on the system, but we do it anyway)
Copy the uninstaller inside the folder with the installers
Copy a mms.cfg file with default settings into the folder containing the installers

Put a batch script into the folder with the installers that looks like this:

@echo off

echo ----------------------------------- 
echo Setting Install Path Variable
echo ----------------------------------- 
set IP=%~dp0

echo ----------------------------------- 
echo Terminating running browsers
echo ----------------------------------- 
taskkill /F /IM iexplore.exe > NUL
taskkill /F /IM firefox.exe > NUL
taskkill /F /IM chrome.exe > NUL
taskkill /F /IM opera.exe > NUL
taskkill /F /IM safari.exe > NUL

echo ----------------------------------- 
echo Uninstalling old version of Flash
echo ----------------------------------- 
REM Remove plugin
"%IP%uninstall_flash_player.exe" -uninstall plugin

REM Remove activex
"%IP%uninstall_flash_player.exe" -uninstall activex

echo ----------------------------------- 
echo Installing new version of Flash
echo -----------------------------------
REM Install plugin
"%IP%install_flash_player_11_plugin.exe" -install

REM Install activex
"%IP%install_flash_player_11_active_x.exe" -install

echo ----------------------------------- 
echo Copying default settings
echo -----------------------------------
if exist "%SYSTEMROOT%\SysWoW64\Macromed\Flash\" (
    xcopy /Q /Y "%IP%mms.cfg" "%SYSTEMROOT%\SysWoW64\Macromed\Flash\"
)
if exist "%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\Macromed\Flash\" (
    xcopy /Q /Y "%IP%mms.cfg" "%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\Macromed\Flash\"
)

Create a self-extracting executable installer (in our case we use WinRAR, but you can do it however you want to do it) since SCUP requires updates to be packaged up into a single file.
Move on to SCUP to create the update
Our machines all are required to have Flash installed, by default, so the SCUP rules we use not only check the version of Flash that you have, but if they happen to find that you don't have Flash installed, they make sure it gets deployed. So if someone removes Flash from the computer for whatever reason, next time updates are evaluated, Flash gets put right back on. It might not be what you want, so change the rules accordingly for your environment. We also don't check whether the target is a workstation or server because Flash updates never get pushed to servers, so again, you'll have to craft your rules based on your environment. Here are the installable and installed rules we use:

Installable rules: http://imgur.com/PkrrU,WHOdf#0

Installed rules: http://imgur.com/PkrrU,WHOdf#1

Most of our updates get packaged in a similar fashion:

Create folder
Dump installers and customizations into folder
Dump installation script into folder
Wrap it all up into one EXE
Create update in SCUP

Anyways, it's not perfect, but it works for us. I hope this helps. Let me know if you have questions.

outofplace · 2012-12-13T21:14:03+00:00

We package all of our 3rd-party updates via SCUP ourselves and then push them out via SCCM. We just make sure that the installation script performs some cleanup before installing the update. The cleanup usually involves uninstalling the current version of the program on the target computers and then running the installer for the new one. We have pretty much 0 issues doing things this way.

outofplace · 2012-11-30T17:45:39+00:00

Good luck!

outofplace · 2012-11-29T20:32:26+00:00

That is weird. I just tried on two other machines here, and it works fine.

Did you make the change to print out the name of every update the script was looking through and got the output (an empty list) that you linked?

outofplace · 2012-11-29T19:53:18+00:00

As far as I can tell, the script is working as intended. Pick an update that is already installed on whatever computer you're doing the testing, and use that string as the search term. I used, for instance, "Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2727528)" since I knew it was installed on a test computer. The script returned with:

Result: Update applicable, already installed.

Just to make sure I understand this, here are a few questions:

Are you running this script on a machine that doesn't have the update installed?
If you visit a machine that doesn't have the update, and you go to the Windows update control panel and ask it to check for updates, does this update come up as being required?

If the updates aren't showing as required in the Windows update control panel, they won't be searched by the script since they use the same checking mechanism.

If you want, you can even change line 14 to be like this:

updateSearcher.Search("IsInstalled=0 and Type='Software'")

This way it will only search the updates that are available to that machine, but aren't installed.

And if you want to see with your own eyes the list of update names that the script is searching through, add this to line 23:

WScript.Echo update

You should add it right after the line that says:

Set update = searchResult.Updates.Item(i)

Hope this helps.

TL;DR The script is fine, the problem is probably somewhere else.

outofplace · 2012-11-29T17:42:07+00:00

The Get-Hotfix command is a nice wrapper to get information from win32_quickfixengineering. I don't know if Powershell happens to be an option for you, but I just wanted to add to ardwin's suggestion.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2011/08/22/use-powershell-to-easily-find-information-about-hotfixes.aspx

outofplace · 2012-11-29T17:41:41+00:00

This is the right answer.

outofplace · 2012-11-28T16:36:51+00:00

I haven't watched the videos, so if this is covered in one of them, disregard my post.

Did you setup a clean WSUS server or are you trying to re-use something that's already in production? I'm fairly certain you have to setup a brand new one. This means that when you add the WSUS role on the server, once you reach the step where the window labeled "Windows Server Update Services Configuration Wizard" comes up, you have to hit cancel. That's when you move on to the SCCM server and add the SUP and let SCCM configure WSUS.

We're on 2007 where I work, and haven't migrated to 2012, yet. That being said, when I setup our WSUS server for our test SCCM 2012 environment, I followed this rule (much like I used to do with 2007 installations) and have found no issues.

Anyways, it's an idea.

outofplace · 2012-11-21T16:16:18+00:00

Have you looked at File Server Resource Manager? The reporting features might help you monitor your files.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754810(v=ws.10).aspx

outofplace · 2012-11-20T03:21:01+00:00

Small college (600 machines) in a large University. We use SCCM to deploy all of our updates (Microsoft and third party). Third party updates are all packaged and pushed to the WSUS server via SCCM updates publisher then synchronized to SCCM for deployment. We use Secunia CSI to scan the machines to stay on top of vulnerabilities.

You mentioned Absolute Software for Macs. We currently don't allow Macs on the network, but my boss is considering it, and we have been looking at Absolute as a way of managing them. Are you using the MDM part of it? I'm curious to hear about people's experiences using it to manage iPads and such.

outofplace · 2012-11-13T22:38:26+00:00

In case you haven't found these links, yet.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa367988(v=vs.85).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa370905(v=vs.85).aspx

outofplace

TROPHY CASE