Is there a way to set up for silent "unattended installs"

[duckhere 0]

Has anyone found a way to do unattended installs of the Geovision software? Contacted tech support, they don't know of any and couldn't (wouldn't??) tell me if the settings are kept in an ini file or registry. Any ideas?

[rory 0]

No there is not. I wrote a vbscript back when 8.0 came out which was an automated install, unattended but not hidden, and it did work, also worked on an EXE version but there were too many issues as their installer was so old and tended to clash and crash alot. There IS an silent uninstall though by default, but basically their installation dept never added in that feature to the installation.

[Soundy 1]

You MIGHT be able to do something with Microsoft's SyDiff utility (google it for info on usage and where to find it).

 

Basically, you run it once, it takes a snapshot of the system, then you install and configure the software, run SysDiff again, and it creates a "difference" file containing all the code, file and configuration changes, that can then be applied to a new system.

 

It works well with some installs - usually simpler ones that don't need to make a lot of complex system changes. It might work in this case.

 

Beyond that, as Rory indicates, some installers that are properly written support command-line switches to help automate their running, but it doesn't sound like GV's does any of this.

 

The other option is to use disk images for deployment. There are several different tools and methods for doing this, some of which are more "automatable" than others. When I worked at a technical school, we had it down for some labs (the ones whose network cards supported PXE boot) where we could build a complete image, including OS, software, system tweaks, etc., put it on a network share, then when told to (through the boot menu), the machines would boot from the network, run Ghost, and automatically apply the image... after that it would reboot, run a few other automated configuration processes, and be done.

 

Imaging works best if you have identical hardware in all the machines, but it IS possible to tweak a system before taking the image, so that it will work across different types of hardware, including different motherboard chipsets.

[duckhere 0]

Thanks for the ideas. I am attempting to use MS Deployment toolkit to automate the installs. Vender is going to be changing mainboards on me so I was hoping to avoid the image route but that may be the only way this time.

 

I'll also try the sysdiff program and see how successful I am with that. If I can get it down to registry entries I can import settings.

[rory 0]

Thing is, installing the Geo software is the easiest part, its the time it takes to tweak and setup the system itself as well as the geo settings that can be the pain. If I built enough of them I would automate everything in addition to the current imaging but just dont have that kind business.

[Soundy 1]

Thanks for the ideas. I am attempting to use MS Deployment toolkit to automate the installs. Vender is going to be changing mainboards on me so I was hoping to avoid the image route but that may be the only way this time.

 

I'll also try the sysdiff program and see how successful I am with that. If I can get it down to registry entries I can import settings.

There's another utility in there that you can build into the image, so the first time the new deployment runs, the thing re-detects the hardware and other system-to-system changes... can't remember what it's called offhand, basically it's the last thing you run before grabbing the image, but it works fairly well.

 

EDIT: "sysprep" is the one you're looking for, if memory serves.