Silent installation from the command line works great!

[timallen]

I know this is a topic that has been gone over before, but I've just had such a successful experience with doing silent installations from the command line that I felt that I should advocate it a little.

We have a client with 120 installation licenses on OneWorld Xe (*not* named licenses or any of the other sales, um, confusion JDE sprays at their customers: 120 real installations possible). They have a Novell system where they can launch programs on their client machines. They wanted to do these 120 first-time installations over a period of a couple of days. I started imagining sleepless unshaved nights doing monkey work.

I got the KG document OTM-00-0067 "Installing Packages from the Command Line". We found we were able to use this to do the installations, and I have become a new silent install disciple because:
1) The silent installation went faster
2) We had control of the level of detail in the installation log
3) I didn't have to go point and click on 120 machines.

There were a couple of caveats, though (on Xe at least):

1) Although the document says it's for Pre-Xe, Xe, and ERP 8.0, the command line still refers to "\\<deployment server>\b733\...". This should be B7333 for Xe.
2) The -t command line option causes the installation to fail. It's not necessary anyway (it marks the default behavior of installing development objects)...
2a) The -c command line option, which selects to *not* install development objects, causes a warning ("CSetupApp::InitInstance: Setup was passed the unrecognized option '-c'."), but still does its job.
3) The user has to have READ/WRITE permission to B7333 on the deployment server.

Here was the command line which worked so well for us:

"\\DEPLOYMENT_SERVER\b7333\OneWorld Client Install\Setup.exe" -d c:\b7 -p PY7333F001 -s -e H -c

-d : drive and path to install to
-p : package name
-s : silent (-v for verbose)
-e H : full logging (-e I information, -e W warnings, -e E errors)
-c : compact (don't install development objects-- put no option to install them).

Hope this is helpful.
(Ignore the configuration in my tag line, this one is:
Update 6 SP19.1 Windows 2000 ES & DS, SQL Server)

 

[SULLY1]

Tim

How do you launch this command line? Is it from each of the 120 client machines?

Patty

 

[DSauve]

Tim,

I agree wholeheartedly that the silent installation is great! We have about 140 clients which we load with a new full package every 3-4 months. With about 4-5 people, we are able to load all these PC's over the course of one and one-half days.

Thanks for the information about the -c option. Also, we use the -r option to remove the existing installation.

It's been a great timesaver for us, and we know that all our clients are installed the same way, with minimal interaction required -- just run a batch file!

 

[aruizjde]

The way I do it is, copy a batch file (INSTALLPD.BAT) to all computers that have JDE installed. The batch file just has the silent install command line. Then I run another batch file that issues the AT command on the remote computer to schedule the batch file to run at night (AT \\D2640 22:00 "C:\WINNT\INSTALLPD.BAT". It works great with full packages but I am having problems getting it to work just update packages. I am in the middle of Update 7 so my time is occupied but once it is done I will figure it out!

 

[SULLY1]

I guess I'm really dense when it comes to these batch files.

First you say you copy a batch file for exp. INSTALLPD.BAT. How do you do that? Are you touching every client?

Second you issue a command on the remote computer to run at night. The remote computer, is this the client? I'm still not getting how 120 clients run this job.

Patty

 

[jim_smith]

Tim,

thank you for sharing this information with the community. I did not know about this feature. I think it is great! I have been experimenting with it all morning. I have this to share on my part:

**** BE CAREFUL **** with the -d option. If OneWorld is on the C drive (C:\B7) and you specify another drive by accident, for example the D drive (which in my case is the CD-ROM), the setup will delete all pathcodes on your C drive before failling!!!... incredible but true. I have tested this little discovery 3 times in a row. All three times I experienced the same behaviour. I stumbled on this by accident. On my workstation, I have a C drive for Windows and a D drive for OneWorld. I am used to installing OneWorld on the D drive. On my developer's workstation, he has only a C drive... his D drive is the CD-ROM..... when trying to refresh his development pathcode with a new full package, I ended up deleting everything under C:\B7 by accident!!!

Just something I think people should watch out for.

 

[jstooge]

Patty...

One way to get it out to all the clients is to put a copy command in the
login script. That way whenever the next person logs onto the machine,
the .BAT file will get copied.

One slick admin at a client I worked at created an empty text file and
named it P010103FXA, which was the name of the current full package. She
then used the login script to copy this file to the root of drive C on
all her client machines. She also had on each machine a blank file that
was named using the computer name, for instance CMP001. Then when a new
full package was to be deployed, lets say P011503FXA, she would create a
new blank file named P011503FXA on the login server, create a new
directory on the login server named P011503FXA, insert commands into the
login script that would check for the existence of the file
C:\P010103FXA, if exist, run the command line installation, delete the
C:\P010103FXA file, copy the blank file P011503FXA to C:\, and then copy
the CMP001 file to the P011503FXA directory on the login server. This
way, whenever a new full package was to be deployed, she simply had to
modify a few commands in the system login script, create a blank file and
new directory, and as each machine was logged into, she could monitor the
subdirectory that would be populated with the files having the names of
the machines that ran the install.

A simple solution, but it worked nicely.

Jim

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[altquark]

Gawd people

Does no one read my posts ?!!!

What scares me more is that no-one seems to read the manual ! Silent Installs were introduced on day 1 !

For more information on setting this up to automatically install multiple update packages - see "Batch Script to install all packages" - written way before 12/10 originally....

Bah ! It seems JDEList deletes messages that are 2 years old !!!!! Could we move this to "Tips and Tricks" ?

I am therefore posting the following script again since a number of people have asked for this !


This assumes that you name your packages as follows :

DV7333FI00 - Full Package, 9th Generation (I)
DV7333FI01 - 1st Update package
DV7333FI02 - 2nd Update package
.
.



The following script will install the first full parent package, and then install all of the updates following.

Note that it uses the "SILENT" option to install the package. This script can handle 99 updates to 1 parent package.

Note that it would be easy to pass the parent package name into this batch program and parse the 1st 8 characters instead of hardcoding DV7333FI


@echo off
if "%1" == "}{" goto %2

for %%a in (01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99) do call %0 }{ SecA %%a

goto End


:SecA
echo Installing ... DV7333FI%3
if exist c:\jdeinst.log del c:\jdeinst.log
if not exist \\jdedpy1\b7333\package_inf\DV7333FI%3.inf echo DV7333FI%3 does not exist...
if exist \\jdedpy1\b7333\package_inf\DV7333FI%3.inf "\\jdedpy1\b7333\OneWorld Client Install\Setup.exe" -S -P DV7333FI%3 -D C:\B7
if exist c:\jdeinst.log copy c:\jdeinst.log DV7333FI%3-Install.log


:End

 

[wilsonja]

Maybe in your script you could check for C:\B7 or another file that would
at least indicate that you are attempting to install on the correct drive
before you actually executed the unattended install portion of the script.

FWIW,
James





jim_smith
<jim.smith.nl@sym To: James Wilson/Milwaukee/IBM@IBMUS
patico.ca> cc:
Sent by: Subject: Re: Silent installation from the command line works great!
owner-jdelist@jde
list.com


03/25/2003 04:09
PM
Please respond to
jdelist






Tim,thank you for sharing this information with the community. I did not
know about this feature. I think it is great! I have been experimenting
with it all morning. I have this to share on my part:**** BE CAREFUL ****
with the -d option. If OneWorld is on the C drive (C:\B7) and you specify
another drive by accident, for example the D drive (which in my case is the
CD-ROM), the setup will delete all pathcodes on your C drive before
failling!!!... incredible but true. I have tested this little discovery 3
times in a row. All three times I experienced the same behaviour. I
stumbled on this by accident. On my workstation, I have a C drive for
Windows and a D drive for OneWorld. I am used to installing OneWorld on the
D drive. On my developer's workstation, he has only a C drive... his D
drive is the CD-ROM..... when trying to refresh his development pathcode
with a new full package, I ended up deleting everything under C:\B7 by
accident!!! Just something I think people s!
hould watch out for.
Jim.
Xe U2 SP20_N1
ES is AS/400 V5R1M0 with Central Objects, 2 CPUs, 4 GB RAM, 550 GB disk
space
DS is Windows 2000, 1400 Mhz CPU, 1 GB RAM, 73 GB disk space
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[aruizjde]

I was trying to figure out why you would create a script that would install all the updates after installing a full package, especially since we were not re-installing the updates on a new computer. It brought out some interesting debates with JDE support. In the end this is the anwer:

If the original full client package isn't compressed then you can install a brand new PC by just applying the full client package. In that case, when you submit an update package it will alter full client package executables, specs and sources; this way, full package is always updated with the latest changes.

But, if the original full client package is compressed, then you'll have to recompress it before installing it on a new machine. In this case, update packages will alter sources, specs and executables but NOT the .CAB files!

Remember deployment is slower with an uncompressed package. So if you're doing a large amount of full deployments you want the package to be compressed.

 

[altquark]

Correct - but using the above silent install script would prevent the necessity of recompressing the package each and every time you apply an update package.

Imagine a heavy development environment (for which this script was being developed for) where there could be 50 update packages over a 2 week period in the Development Pathcode - you would have to compress the parent package 50 seperate times !!!! Each compress takes quite some time, believe me !

With this method - you don't need to "reinstall" your entire Full Package each time - just run the silent install over just the update packages.

I think I'll take my way over JDE's suggested method any day of the week - I just don't have the time to recompress and reinstall a full package each time I want to get a client up-to-date.

 

[aruizjde]

My point was, if you do not use compression (which we don't), you do not have to recompress or apply the updates to a new computer. When you build an update package it gets included in the Full Package. When a new comptuers comes along all you have to do is install the Full Package which contains all the updates.