Software Installation Post-Image
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Hi all,
What do you think is the best way to install software post-image? I currently have Oracle Client 12cR1 as well as Office 2013 on a few images, but I often have the problems of:
a) The Oracle Client has to be uninstalled and reinstalled after the hostname has been changed (otherwise it won’t work properly), and
b) Office 2013 has to be uninstalled to make way for Office 2016 (or vice-versa if we don’t have licenses for Office 2016).I was looking at potentially running WPKG, but I also read on here that I can set-up a snap-in to install Office (I’m not sure if this is possible with Oracle, but I assume it must be somehow through scripts).
Would the snap-in only run after being imaged, or could I run it at any time? (i.e. if I forget to add the snap-in during the full host registration and inventory, could I add it through the web-gui and then run it?)
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
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@RobTitian16 said in Software Installation Post-Image:
Would the snap-in only run after being imaged, or could I run it at any time?
A snapin that is associated with a particular host would automatically be queued every time the host was imaged. You can also run snapins on-demand whenever you like. Of course, you still need to have the snapin associated with said host. You can use groups to associate snapins with hosts en-mass, as with anything else in FOG.
Snapins can be added during Full Registration or through the web interface.
As far as software deployment goes, there are no two that are the same. MSIs in general are usually the easiest because they all have some uniform options like silent, uninstall, install, etc. But each also has their own set of arguments specific to the software too. Like FOG Client MSI doesn’t have the same arguments as Faronics Insight MSI.
Fog can deploy any executable as long as it is silent and can be run by the
SYSTEM
orroot
user. Silent means zero user interaction, zero pop-ups, zero windows appearing, nothing, nada, zip - absolute silence during installation. Making it silent is unique to each piece of software you’re deploying. Snapins you can deploy would include but isn’t limited to EXEs, MSIs, VBScript, PowerShell, Linux and OSX Shell Script, batch scripts, and large amounts of packaged files using SnapinPacks, and whatever else that is executable that you know how to use.There’s a tutorial somewhere on here about deploying MS Office. There’s numerous other examples. Of course search the forums and you’ll probably get over 1000 results on just the word “snapin”. Here are some articles, the Snapin Examples one is older but still good.
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Snapin_Examples
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=SnapinPacks -
Thanks, Wayne. I’ll test this out shortly and report back my findings