How to install software offline?

[Marco Lorenz]

Hello,

 

we have to deal with the issue that users are out there with very small bandwith connections and sometimes short connection times (e. g. a few minutes to download their emails).

EDIT: Our VPN Connection is only established as soon as a user is logged in and not when the computer has booted up again

That causes the following issuses:

- Large installations will not work without either arranged appointments with the users or them coming in to one of our locations

- running installations will abort, because the lose their connection to their respective scalability Server

- reboots will cause the client to be disconnected from our VPN and will only reconnect when user consciously logs in again.

 

We tried to work around that by creating a "script suite" that utilizes the mechanisms to export software packages on to a medium (USB stick, CD) that are built into ITCM, but this comes with quite a few caveats. One being that you don't get a success status without parsing result files on the client.

 

Now I'm wondering if there's a built-in way to deal with that issue that we just haven't identified, yet?

[Richard Little]

Hi Marco

 

there is an offline container function. see http://www.ca.com/us/support/ca-support-online/product-content/knowledgebase-articles/tec492654.aspx  

for details

Regards

Rich

[Marco Lorenz]

Hello Richard,

 

that is the feature that we incorporated in our approach.

Our script collects the packages that are included in a procedure group, exports them and generates a .cof file.

That Information is transferred to the client and verified against the currently installed software on the client (which is provided through centrally stored .XML files for each computer) when you actually activate the installation process.

After the .cof is processed we allow for a certain time window and then collect the status of the run jobs and see which ones failed and which ones didn't.

(I'll add some background info to my original post that I forgot to mention to explain another issue :-))

The idea is that everything can be controlled and provided through the DSM Explorer.

[Steve Parker]

It Sounds like you should be using the Extended Networking Connectivity (ENC) feature.

[Richard Little]

Hi

 

Do you still need assistance on this?  have you looked at ENC Extended Network Connectivity (ENC) - CA Client Automation - 14.0 - CA Technologies Documentation  ?

 

regards

Rich

[Marco Lorenz]

Sorry that it took so long to reply. :-)

I've looked into that documentation, but as far as I understand it, that solution only helps me when the system is out there, but still has a connection to the internet at the time of installation. But our policy only allows VPN connections to our end-points.

And during installation because of a reboot, that VPN connection is lost and can only be re-established through manual means.

But most of our software packages will work without accessing a network resource during installation.

By default CA Client Automation wants to get installation data from a central server during setup.

If there'd be a built-in option to tell the job container or agent that it should download every package before execution and not to be bothered by not being connected to the scalability server, this would probably already solve our issue.

[Steve Parker]

Change the Software Delivery download method to “Internal – NOS-Less”, that way the Agent will not start to install the software package until it has been fully downloaded.

 

 

 

[Marco Lorenz]

Thank you for that reply, Steve.

Could you answer the following questions in regard of this configuration:

a) How will it react to a reboot in between the installation process?

b) And how will it be affected when processing a job container when being disconnected from the scalability server?

c) Is this a valid solution for MSI packages or will they still want to access the MSILIB share (or is that only an issue for /admin packages)?

[lecri01]

If you choose a local install as the msi type it is looking for the package locally. If you choose other types like administrative install then it will look to the msi library share.  As Steve mentioned in an earlier post  if you select NOS as the download type it will download the file to the SD temp location locally then perform the installation from there.

 

 

 

Richard Lechner

Principal Engineering Services Architect

 

CA Technologies

Mobile: [phone] | [e-mail]

 

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[Steve Parker]

You best bet is to use the ENC function which operates like a private VPN for just Client Automation communication.