[Fusioninventory-user] Incremental Software Deployment and Version Control

[Guillaume Rousse]

On 14/08/2011 05:08, Rob Townley wrote:
>> And once you have .msi packages, you may as well use AD GPO for deployment,
>> which offer all the grouping you need. The only advantages of previous tools
>> are better bandwidth usage if you have network limits, and more options for
>> installation time (GPO only allows for installation at boot and logon time).
>
> Setup.exe can be made silent or even switchless and silent.  MSI may
> be better at uninstalls, but exe installs can be reversed.
Well, you don't want to download a 400Mo payload every hour on every 
host to just try to install it, if not needed. So you first have to 
check if the software is installed, in which version, and take a 
decision from the available version. Without a packaging system, you 
have to handle this manually in a wrapper script, for every software you 
plan to install. Here is such a script for fusioninventory, for 
instance: 
http://forge.fusioninventory.org/projects/fusioninventory-agent/wiki/Vbs_install_upgrade.

> GPO only works with Professional Editions of Windows and is not meant
> to work across the internet.
Good to know. However, that's likely the case for actual sysadmin tasks, 
unless you're dealing with managing grandma's box across the country.

Anyway, my point was just than selecting a deployement tool is only half 
of the problem, the software payload being the other.
-- 
BOFH excuse #390:

Increased sunspot activity.