Useful stuff to remember ... (MS Windows related)

Mar 3, 2005

Just to remind myself :)

MakeMSI - Make MSI based installation files - If you have a nice Active Directory to take care of, and a few thousand clients begging (not really) for new software, this might come in handy. I use it to prepare standard .exe setup files for Software Installation via GPO. Word of advice, really test your scripts, use VM's (they help a lot ;) ), try the install and uninstall parts and ....well, deploy it, works like a charm :) . In my case, I have 18 sites throughout the country, one DC in each site, so I've assigned policies to each site and replicated the installation directories to the servers (mental note: write that damn sync script :) ) and apparently things are working fine and dandy, most people don't even notice the instalattion.
Speaking of syncronyzing/copying files in Windows, Robocopy is a pretty nice tool (part of the Resource Kit, you can Mirror directories, copy ACL's, everything, nice to keep around.
One reference site for looking up commands is mr. Simon Sheppard's website, very nice :)
And because Windows actually has command line stuff, this is/might be very very useful - Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line