I've produced my first MSI (more luck than jugement) and handed over to the IT lads to install. They're distributing the msi using SMS and have come back to me to say that they believe there is a problem with my script.
Apparently, they can install my msi, but the user has to be logged on in order for the install to work. They want to push out the install and have it run without the user logged on.
Firstly, is that possible and secondly, what do I need to do to my msi in order to make this work?
When installing via SMS it will run in a silent mode. Therefore the installuisequence will not run. You most likely have a bunch of custom actions running in the installuisequence that need to be moved over to the installexecutesequence. I would suggest that you also enable msi logging on the machine set to a value of 'voicewarmupx', so that when they run it you can have all that lovely log info 🙂 To get at the log it usually puts into the users temp folder but running over SMS it will actually get put into c:\windows\temp and it will be called MSI.log
ooh one other point to make is that you most likely want to test your install to semi-simulate what SMS does is to firstly run it in basic UI mode like this
msiexec.exe /i /qb+
This will run your installation without the UI sequence but will provide you a progress bar and will pop up any error messages and provide a succesful prompt at the end. Once you have this working i suggest running it even more closely to SMS by running it completely silently by changing /qb+ to /qn
The only thing you cannot simulate easily is that SMS runs the installation as an elevated service account
Thanks for this. I've checked the Sequencs -> Installation -> User Interface and have two custom actions in there that set ARPNOMODIFY to 1 and LIMITUI to 1. Nothing else.
The rest of my custom actions appear in the Execute sequence.
I'll chase the IT people to see if they created a log - I'm sure they did (or can). My biggest problem is the 20 minutes experience with MSI that I have!
