This is more of an IT question for the Developer; I have ran into an issue where we deploy Dynamo to large number of users in our company (BuroHappold) using SCCM. All my installation tests are failing for non-administrative users because the installer seems to be relying on elevated privileges, so anybody who is not a local admin will be presented with ‘insert your credentials’ window the second he clicks Install.
Manual installation outside of SCCM is working fine as long as one has admin rights. Otherwise I get the credentials prompt.
I’ve noticed the program has been compiled with Inno Setup, which comes with its own command parameters, although I can’t find a way to bypass the admin rights requirement.
Is anyone here using SCCM for software deployments or has found a way to bypass that requirement?
Previous Dynamo releases have installed fine using the same method.
Hi @Ian_Keough1 can you Help (straight to the top)? - We have hundreds of users hungry to jump to 1.2 but the new compiler is holding us back from deployment, we haven’t seen these issues previously.
@Bartosz.Jekiel, from 1.0 onwards, the innosetup exe installer contains two MSI, since the installation is per machine basis, it requires administrative privileges. I am not sure if you can bypass admin credentials while installing from MSI.
Thanks for your comment; MSIs are usually quite flexible to handle, so I’ll check the behaviour of these; but here’s something else I’ve noticed since the move to version 1.0 - the package available to download from Dynamo site and the package which comes as the latest Revit 2017 update both contain what looks like the same versions of Dynamo Revit and Dynamo Core MSI. When you look closer you will notice the difference in size by 10 or so KB.
Extracting the DynamoInstall1.2.1.exe gives me not only DynamoCore.msi, DynamoRevit.msi but also IronPython-2.7.3.msi, RevitAddinUtility.dll and RevitInstallDetective.exe (aside from two subfolders and installation logs).
Would the size difference in the Autodesk update package come from the fact that they have compiled RevitAddinUtility.dll and RevitInstallDetective.exe into the MSIs?
The installation behaviour of Dynamo is quite inconsistent in our environment right now and I’m not sure which upgrade method is the recommended one (for the mass-deployment)?
I would prefer to roll with two separate MSIs, but need to understand what is the difference between your original files and the Autodesk packaged ones.
@Bartosz.Jekiel, DynamoInstall 1.2.1.exe contains the two MSIs, and some pre-requisite for Dynamo such as IronPython, Direct3D, etc. and few utility binaries that helps installer to detect Revit installations. That why you see the size difference. If your system already has all the pre-requisite installed, then you can use the MSI installers directly for your deployment.
How are you extracting the msi packages from the executable? I tried all the command line methods I’m aware of and also tried using 7-zip (testing on Dynamo 1.3.1) but none are successful. Can this be done in this version? When installing from the executable in the system context via a script (ex: in Software Center or SCCM), Dynamo Core does not install. Having the .msi files might resolve this issue. Thanks.
It’s been a while since I posted this; basically I had to change the approach how we deploy Revit and Dynamo now. Overall, due to the growing complexity of Revit installers, it seems the best solution to this is to let Autodesk take care of any Dynamo updates. I just deploy the .exe installer of Revit 2017 (via SCCM) and let it update any components it contains. If you try to extract Dynamo separately, you may encounter problems with Revit installer itself.
I’m not sure if this will be of any help to you though.
All the best,
Bart
Unfortunately I think I’m swaying away from that approach because I keep finding a mix of versions in the Autodesk update packages. For example I just extracted the .msi files from the Revit 2017.2.2 update and the version of Dynamo in there is 1.2.1, whereas we have already installed 1.3.1 (which came with the Revit 2018.1 update!). What a mess.
Due to this, I prefer to separate everything out and have full control over what to install and what to omit. Otherwise we run more risk of deployments failing due to unexpected warning messages. Some installers aren’t smart enough to just skip over if a newer version is already installed and issue a warning dialog (which in a silent install with no UI means everything else hangs up and times out). I wish they wouldn’t package things this way, but oh well Thanks again.
Thanks again.