EXE to MSI Converter
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@Obsolesce
Food for thought, and maybe some ammunition for a battle to add Chocolatey to our standard tools, but for the time being I've got the mandate to use existing tools to roll things out, and existing tools means AD infrastructure / GPOs, scripts and all the fun that entails.
Appreciate the options, but does anyone have any recommendations for the exe to msi converter?
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@notverypunny said in EXE to MSI Converter:
@Obsolesce
Food for thought, and maybe some ammunition for a battle to add Chocolatey to our standard tools, but for the time being I've got the mandate to use existing tools to roll things out, and existing tools means AD infrastructure / GPOs, scripts and all the fun that entails.Appreciate the options, but does anyone have any recommendations for the exe to msi converter?
DOesn't the .exe have built-in switches to install silently? You could install it via a PowerShell script.
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@Obsolesce said in EXE to MSI Converter:
@notverypunny said in EXE to MSI Converter:
@Obsolesce
Food for thought, and maybe some ammunition for a battle to add Chocolatey to our standard tools, but for the time being I've got the mandate to use existing tools to roll things out, and existing tools means AD infrastructure / GPOs, scripts and all the fun that entails.Appreciate the options, but does anyone have any recommendations for the exe to msi converter?
DOesn't the .exe have built-in switches to install silently? You could install it via a PowerShell script.
Yeah, it can do silent installs. The part that I find ugly is that (unless there's something that I'm missing, which seems more and more possible as I work through test cases) the script would have to run on every startup (or shutdown) and check for the correct, installed version and either
A - exit if the correct version is installed
B - install if it doesn't find a receiver
C - jump through a bunch of hoops if it finds the wrong version installed (The RTME plugin that we use to optimize SfB has to be managed in tandem with this... it's a royal pita because stuff will seem to install properly but then the user sessions were failing to connect with an "invalid handle" error)I spent most of the afternoon yesterday going cross-eyed working out the validations, cases and sequencing to try to script things, and it still didn't work as a shut-down script so I'd like to see if the GPO route is any better.
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@notverypunny said in EXE to MSI Converter:
@Obsolesce said in EXE to MSI Converter:
@notverypunny said in EXE to MSI Converter:
@Obsolesce
Food for thought, and maybe some ammunition for a battle to add Chocolatey to our standard tools, but for the time being I've got the mandate to use existing tools to roll things out, and existing tools means AD infrastructure / GPOs, scripts and all the fun that entails.Appreciate the options, but does anyone have any recommendations for the exe to msi converter?
DOesn't the .exe have built-in switches to install silently? You could install it via a PowerShell script.
Yeah, it can do silent installs. The part that I find ugly is that (unless there's something that I'm missing, which seems more and more possible as I work through test cases) the script would have to run on every startup (or shutdown) and check for the correct, installed version and either
A - exit if the correct version is installed
B - install if it doesn't find a receiver
C - jump through a bunch of hoops if it finds the wrong version installed (The RTME plugin that we use to optimize SfB has to be managed in tandem with this... it's a royal pita because stuff will seem to install properly but then the user sessions were failing to connect with an "invalid handle" error)I spent most of the afternoon yesterday going cross-eyed working out the validations, cases and sequencing to try to script things, and it still didn't work as a shut-down script so I'd like to see if the GPO route is any better.
Sounds very doable.
Turn it into a scheduled task that runs the script. Can it install it as the System account? That's always the best way, but I know some things need to install in the logged-on user's context.
You can deploy the scheduled task via GPP, as a log-in script or at whatever schedule you want... hourly, or whatever.
Have some checks in place of the script like you said to first verify installation status and version, that way it doesn't do anything if all is well.
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@travisdh1 said in EXE to MSI Converter:
@notverypunny said in EXE to MSI Converter:
@scottalanmiller Wondering what solution you ended up going with for this. I'd like to use GPO to push and manage Citrix Receiver but they don't provide an msi. Their solution is either a per-user logon .bat or a per-machine startup .bat
Citrix receiver is in the Chocolaty repository. You could script installing chocolaty and then push a script to install it with
choco install -y citrix-receiverFYI, Citrix Receiver has been retired.
The new version is Citrix Workspace.that said - many businesses are still running old Citrix farms and Workspace has issues with NFuse (or whatever the new name is) and old farms.
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@notverypunny said in EXE to MSI Converter:
@travisdh1 said in EXE to MSI Converter:
@notverypunny said in EXE to MSI Converter:
@scottalanmiller Wondering what solution you ended up going with for this. I'd like to use GPO to push and manage Citrix Receiver but they don't provide an msi. Their solution is either a per-user logon .bat or a per-machine startup .bat
Citrix receiver is in the Chocolaty repository. You could script installing chocolaty and then push a script to install it with
choco install -y citrix-receiverInteresting, thanks for the idea but it looks like they're installing / tracking the CR stream (they're pushing 4.12) and we're looking to install the 4.9 LTSR
Travis - case in point on people running old rust.
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Deploying a scheduled task can work really well for installing software, I would definitely recommend it over built-in GP msi deployment.
If you have a WSUS server, that works really well too. Not well enough to be the reason to maintain a WSUS server though.
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This thread is like a honey trap, lol. Works really well.
