Snapin with dependencies to be installed once

[Arowana]

Hi,

I have a Windows 10 snapin pack that might require some dependencies to be installed. We are using metered connection so we want to reduce the snapin size as much as possible.

If data usage wouldn’t matter, I could have the dependencies included into the Snapin pack, everytime. But the following approach is prefered:

Snapin install script check dependencies, if a dependency is missing, it downloads it and installs it.

My question is what approach should I take to store and download those dependencies. Should they be on the FOG FTP?

Then that would require the install script to have a notion of the FTP credentials, is that not a problem since the client already has access to the FTP?

I will greatly appreciate some feedback, I don’t want to do something wrong.

Note: I cannot risk to install those dependencies with a specific snapin pack update as this update is not guaranteed to be rolled out to all platforms before the next snapin comes in.

Additional questions: If i go for this solution, is there a way to communicate FTP address and credentials to the script through some FOG variables?

[george1421]

@arowana Does your remote site have a server where you can preposition these dependencies files? Remember for windows the script or installer runs as a windows user. The fog client runs these snapins as SYSTEM which has admin rights on the local computer where the snapin is being installed. Your install script can map a drive to a windows file share and copy the files over smb to the target computer. That would be the easiest. If the files were stored at the remote site then it would not impact your metered connection rates. If you used a powershell script to install your application you can use a function similar to curl or wget to download the file from the internet using scripting. You might be able to use FTP too, but I have never tried. You don’t need to specifically download from the FOG server, but you can. If you wanted to download from the FOG server, I would setup a new user on the FOG server that has very limited rights, maybe to read only from the source directory and that is all. I would not use the FOG ftp user because that has more authority than what is needed here.