Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 1:56 am Post subject: Patch and Apple Remote Desktop
I have a question concerning patches and Apple Remote Desktop (ARD): ARD allows the distribution and installation of installation packages on a whole bunch of computers at the same time. However, even though the NeoOffice Patches seem to be partially official installation packages using the apple installer, they are different, so that I cannot use ARD.
Is there a way how I can distribute and install the patches via ARD without having to log into each computer and start the patch manually?
I do not have any experience with ARD's package distribution but I am curious what is not working in NeoOffice's patch installers. All of our installers use the standard Mac OS X installer package otherwise the Mac OS X installer tool would not run them. I would assume that
Can you rerun the patch installer via ARD and when an error occurs, find and post the errors that occur? The errors that I would most likely expect to see are:
- NeoOffice is running. The patch installer requires that NeoOffice not be running or it will fail.
- Admin authentication of the user running the installer fails. I would assume that ARD runs the installer as root but if not, our installer packages are marked as requiring admin authentication like Apple's system updates so you will need to run as the root user to perform a hands off installation.
- The patch installer cannot find the path of the existing NeoOffice installation. If you moved the NeoOffice installation out of the /Applications folder and you are running ARD as a user that has not previously launched NeoOffice, the patch installer will be able to find where NeoOffice was moved to and will fail.
Unfortunately, we do not have any tools for hands off remote distribution and we only provide installations through the Mac OS X installer tool. However, if you have some tool on each machine that can execute scripts or Terminal commands as the root user and you can place our .dmg file on a remote volume that each of your machines can read, you could run our installer using the Mac OS X installer tool's Terminal "installer" command and using the "hdiutil" command to open and close the .dmg file.
Note, however, that if you have moved the NeoOffice outside of the /Applications folder, running as root will still cause you problems and you will need to copy a real user's ~/Library/Preferences/NeoOffice-3.0/.lastcontentshome file into root's ~/Library/Preferences/NeoOffice-3.0/.lastcontentshome so that the installer can find the location of NeoOffice.
I wear sackcloth and ashes... I'm so sorry! Don't know what I did wrong before, but actually, it does work...
Good to hear it works. But you still might run into cases where our regular, language pack, or patch installers fail due to one of the three cases that I mentioned in my previous post.
If you encounter a failure again, definitely post any errors or other messages ARD has available and we will try to determine what is causing the error and suggest workarounds to try.
If you encounter a failure again, definitely post any errors or other messages ARD has available and we will try to determine what is causing the error and suggest workarounds to try.
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