W2K3 -- Terminal Services -- MSI install issue

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Guest

Hi Everyone

I am shooting this mail here because, I thought, one of you could help me in finding a clue with the problem we are currently running into

Here is the problem statement: "Installation of our product is not successful via Terminal Services session"

The install app was built in C/C++ which will interact with WMI to launch our other install modules developed using InstallShield and MSI. Our product installation comprises all kinds of binaries like driver, service, DLLs and executables.

We experimented few MSFT recommended solutions separately, but all of them produced negative results. They are

#1. Terminal Services offer two modes: install and execute. We changed to execute mode before installation using 'change user /install'
#2. Compile our install app with /TSAWARE linker flag. This required us to upgrade to Visual Studio to SP3 (we upgraded to SP5 also)
#3. As we noticed, all our custom actions were failing in the installation, we changed all of them to run in system context in InstallShield

However, these 3 solutions seems to work correctly in some machines, but consistently fails in other machines

If any additional information is needed, I will gather from our install folks and provide it to you

Your help is much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

~Mohan.
 
In my original post, pl. read solution #1 as

#1. Terminal Services offer two modes: install and execute. We changed to install mode before installation using 'change user /install'

~Mohan.
 
The difference between the working machines and non-worknig machines may be the
type of terminal server. Terminal Server machines that are in "Remote
Administration" mode are (to MSI) simply server machines that allow remote
access. However when the Terminal Server machine is placed in "Application
Server" mode, MSI begins treating it as a multi-user system and activates a
number of different behaviors (such as additional security checks on installs,
interaction with the TS engine to handle multi-user cases, and elevation of non
TSAware deferred custom actions.)

If the problem is caused by failures in your custom actions, I'm afraid that
most of the troubleshooting will involve debugging those custom actions to find
the specific failure points. If I had to guess, I would say that it is a
security problem caused by the fact that some deferred actions run elevated when
per-machine installs are performed on a app-server machine. Either WMI is
rejecting your request or the EXE\DLL you're trying to launch is not accessible
when launched from an elevated account (i.e. if you're installing from a network
share, does the machine itself have access to the network share or just the
user?).

More information on issues specific to running MSI on TS can be found in the
following two help topics:

- Installing from a Terminal Server
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...i/setup/installing_from_a_terminal_server.asp

- Using Custom Actions on a Terminal Server
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/msi/setup/using_custom_actions_on_a_terminal_server.asp

Good luck with your troubleshooting!

-Chris Gouge
Microsoft Windows Installer Team
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MSI FAQ:
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