Automatic Aplication Deployment

Every once in a while I have to do some manual laptop setup. I physically get to crank out the new machines out of the boxes, run the initial windows setup and then go through the motions of removing installing standard set of applications. I also reformat old machines and get them ready for service. The process is a pain in the ass to say the least.

Some of them are already imaged so I just restore them. But then again some machines have nonstandard hardware which require drivers on top of the image. Some users need more specialized software than others and etc. For some of this stuff it just does not make sense to make a dedicated image because the application set changes.

So I’m looking for some easy way to deploy applications on WinXP and Win2k machines without supervision. I want something that works like Apt on Debian. I want to be able to specify a set of applications that need to be downloaded and installed, then go out to lunch while machine sets everything up automatically.

Lately I have been experimenting with InstallPad. It is a .NET 2.0 application that takes in an XML formated list of applications, downloads them, and attempts to silently install them in the background. In a way this is precisely the kind of application that I need. But it’s not perfect. Here is why:

  1. InstallPad requires .NET 2.0 which is usually not installed by default on new machines. This means that in order to get my automatic deployment tool working, I need to first manually download and install a fairly large package. Not a very optimal solution.
  2. InstallPad does not support HTTP authentication which forces me to mirror some of the applications that are password protected.
  3. Not all installers are supported. Some custom installation programs simply fail to launch or cause exceptions.

I’m quite sure that with enough interest in the application the authentication support and installation bugs will be fixed. But that still leaves me with the prerequisite .NET install.

What do use to automatically push out applications and updates to your machines? Please post suggestions in the comments section.

[tags]installpad, installation, deployment, application deployment, administration[/tags]

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