Custom script for automating app install by machine name.

Phew what a title! Ok so it took me about a week to get this little script functioning. The reason that I came up with this script is that I really could not find a way to have automated application installs by machine name that fit into our "ecosystem". The old way we did application installs in XP and before was by a vbscript. I'm not opposed to the old way, but the old way that we did it had no error checking. What I really wanted to do was come up with something that would tell me what application failed to install if one or more did fail. Since this is already handled in MSDT I really wanted to leverage that.

I don't claim to be a programmer. I'm a hardware guy. I'm sure that someone could come up with more eloquent ways of putting this script together (and if you do please let me know), but what I have works for me. In our environment we have labs that need a basic set of software installed and then they have different sets depending on what lab that is. We have tried as best as we can to standardize our machine names, and that helps a lot. Thus, one of the things this script does is strip out the lab name from the machine name (ie BB100-01 is lab BB100 machine number 01).

The script then looks at a file I've called sourcetxt.txt to see what software needs to get installed where. Because of my ability with scripting everything has to be jumbled up together making it hard to read, but if the data is not in the correct format then the script dies. The data in this file takes the form of:

LabID=All:AppID=keyaccess

LabID can be either All or the name of the lab (BB100 from above). The : is the field delimiter. The AppID is the "name" of the application to be installed. I say it like that because the name is actually a file with that exact name + .txt that has the GUID in it for the application. It can have multiple GUIDs in it. I did this because we key our apps and thus I have the actual app install and then I have the keyed exe to install over it (If I ever get the time to devote to learning key server I could learn to deputize installers, but that's a whole other topic right there).

Included with the zip file are three files: \Z-CUSTOM_LabApps.wsf, \Applications\sourcetxt.txt, and \Applications\winscp.txt

I put my script in the scripts folder and I made a subdir called Applications in that folder to house the two files that references.

After the script strips the lab name out, reads the apps required in the lab and then gets the associated GUIDs of those apps it then writes those values back into the VARIABLES.DAT file. This then allows the MSDT framework to handle the app install and report back any app install errors. If you have applications specified in your CustomSettings.ini file then you will have to modify the script to start with the number that you left off with.

I created my own custom task sequence to run this script. I run it during the Preinstall\New Computer Only section after the "Copy scripts" built-in task runs.

Hope it helps!

Download the LabApps.zip here.

Sidebar crashing when installing applications

For whatever reason the sidebar seems to like to crash in the middle of application installations. It does not seem to matter what applications (but CS3 seems to be the worst one) I pick to install it seems to die along the way. It's kinda scary seeing those pop-up boxes coming up asking if you want to debug. So I added the following task sequence to kill the sidebar right before installing apps.

taskkill /F /IM sidebar.exe /T

Custom automated apps script coming.

I think I've came up with my own customs script for automating the application installs. I'm testing now and the script hasn't failed. I just have to now see if MS' programmers are better than I am and the VARIABLES.DAT file can handle spaces and line returns (my script chokes on spaces and line returns). If it can't then I will have to work on my script some more.