Apple Software Update wishes

Since we’ve examined some ways to script around Software Update’s limitations, I thought maybe now would be a good time to describe changes I’d like to see to Apple’s Software Update so we don’t have to hack at it…

Apple Software Update options

At work, I’ve been working on a solution for handling Apple Software Updates for non-administrative users. Each approach I’ve tried has serious obstacles. Here’s a brief history of what I’ve tried and what worked and what didn’t.

Adobe Product Codes

While digging into the Adobe install process, I needed to be able to translate from “AdobeCodes” like “{27B54140-8302-4B5D-83DD-AEE4B18BC7A4}” to product names like “Adobe Encore CS4″ and the installer payload name like “AdobeEncore4All”.

I ended up writing a Python script to crawl through the payloads directory of Adobe install media to generate a table. The script is below, and called like:

python adobeparser.py /path/to/payloads

It’s probably not generally useful, though I include it just for completeness…

#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
"""
adobeparser.py

Created by Greg Neagle on 2009-10-07.
"""

import sys
import os
import optparse
from xml.dom import minidom

def parseAdobeProxyXML(filename):
    payloadinfo = {}
    dom = minidom.parse(filename)
    installer_properties = dom.getElementsByTagName("InstallerProperties")
    if installer_properties:
        properties = installer_properties[0].getElementsByTagName("Property")
        if properties:
            for prop in properties:
                if 'name' in prop.attributes.keys():
                    propertyname = prop.attributes['name'].value
                    propertyvalue = ""
                    for node in prop.childNodes:
                        propertyvalue += node.nodeValue
                    payloadinfo[propertyname] = propertyvalue

    return payloadinfo

def analyzePayloads(dirname):
    payloads = []
    dirname = dirname.rstrip("/")
    if dirname.endswith('payloads'):
        for payloaditem in os.listdir(dirname):
            payloaditempath = os.path.join(dirname, payloaditem)
            if os.path.isdir(payloaditempath):
                for item in os.listdir(payloaditempath):
                    if item.endswith(".proxy.xml"):
                        proxyxmlfile = os.path.join(payloaditempath, item)
                        payloadinfo = parseAdobeProxyXML(proxyxmlfile)
                        payloadinfo['ComponentName'] = payloaditem
                        if payloadinfo:
                            payloads.append(payloadinfo)
                        break

    return payloads

def main():
    p = optparse.OptionParser()
    options, arguments = p.parse_args()
    if arguments:
        payloads = analyzePayloads(arguments[0])
        print "Adobe Code\tName\tVersion"
        for payload in payloads:
            print "%s\t%s\t%s\t%s" % (payload['AdobeCode'], payload['ProductName'], payload['ProductVersion'], payload['ComponentName'])

if __name__ == '__main__':
	main()

I ran this script against the payloads folder on the Adobe CS4 Master Collection installation media. I then sorted the output by AdobeCode and added a header line, and here is the result: a tab-delimited list of AdobeCodes, ProductNames, ProductVersions, and PayloadNames.

I hope this list is useful to someone other than me! Combine this with the info here and you can get a pretty good idea of everything that’s installed.

More Adobe Enterprise Deployment Toolkit FAIL

This post will act as a running log of today’s struggles with the CS4 Deployment Toolkit. This post was updated several times today, so if you read it earlier today, there may be new stuff added….

• Start with the install media for Adobe CS4 Master Collection.
• Run the CS4 Deployment Toolkit app and create a “package” that installs only Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Contribute.
• Move the package and install media files to the test machine
• Run the AdobeUberInstaller

Result?

Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Contribute are installed. But…

So are:
After Effects, Encore, Premiere Pro, and Soundbooth. Or are they?

The application folders are there, but inside: broken apps.

Sheesh.

Adobe Enterprise Deployment Toolkit versus disk images…

After getting lots of suggestions, and spending a few days tearing apart the JavaScript files that are part of the Adobe setup/install process, I have some progress to report on the task of getting Adobe Enterprise Deployment Toolkit “packages” to work from disk images.

Adobe Enterprise Deployment Toolkit FAIL

So I know I’m late to the party here. I’ve just recently started playing with the Adobe Enterprise Deployment Toolkit for deploying CS4 applications. I’ve found all sorts of annoyances and oddities that I wanted to do a sanity check and see if I’m missing anything…

Adobe Lightroom Installer

John Welch has written passionately about Adobe installers many times over the years. Here’s another to add to the list, though not as colorfully as Mr. Welch might have done…

Energy Saver scripting

Here’s a version of a script we use on all our machines in an attempt to reduce energy usage with a minimum of visible impact on users. Our machines are set to not sleep during the day. This script runs hourly, and if it’s after 7pm and the machine has been idle for 20 minutes or more, it tries to sleep the machine if someone is logged in, or shut it down if no-one is logged in.
The machine is also set to automatically startup or wake at 6am M-F. The net result is that most of our desktop machines go to sleep or shutdown a little after 7pm each weeknight and wake up at 6am each week morning, and our users are none the wiser.

Leopard, MobileAccounts, and NFS homes

On the MacEnterprise maillist, Arjen van Bochoven wrote of problems with automatic HomeSyncs under Leopard with NFS home directories. Manual syncs worked fine, but the automatic background syncs would fail with errors that looked like this:

1:: [228] Peer "network" is unable to sync. (-[SPeer_FS_PHD mountPeerVolume] (Peer-FS-PHD.m:140): "'((homePath))' is nil")
0:: [228] [2009/02/19 10:45:10.640] Peer "network" is unable to sync. Not enough peers will be available to continue syncing.
0:: [228] [2009/02/19 10:45:10.640] Aborting sync of "HomeSync_Mirror".

I saw the exact same problem in my environment. This also affected login and logout syncs. Here’s the (ugly) fix.

Image cleanup script

UPDATE 1/23/09: some commenters asked about cleanup of the LKDC (new in Leopard) – I’ve added that to the script.

At the Macworld Expo 2009 Power Tools System Imaging and Deployment session today, I was asked to share a “checklist” of cleanup steps I use when building images the “classic” way. (The InstaDMG methodology of image building makes cleanup steps unneeded.)

Here’s a cleaned-up version of the script I use, with site-specific stuff removed for the most part.