RAMP: X2 and ScrewDrivers automated install/config?

I believe I've found my own solution, so I'll leave it here for posterity.

There is a manual available for the 2X Client that does a nice job of documenting the various options for installation. This manual is for version 10, but I found that switch (TUXGINA=1) for disabling the Single Sign-On is the same in version 9 of the installer.

http://www.2x.com/docs/en/manuals/pdf/2XClientForWindows.pdf

I was able to run an silent install manually that worked, so I feel pretty confident that there won't be any other install issues. This should let us install via Group Policy, which should save time running to 100 PCs.

If I'm feeling ambitious, I may try to push out the RAMP settings as changes to the Registry. I found those under HKEY_USERS\MyUserGUID\Software\2X\AppServerClient (replace MyUserGUID with the actual S-1-5-blah-blah-blah for your account). I like that, because then we wouldn't have to manually touch any PCs for the installation, but I'm not sure if I'll have the time to test that out.

Hope this helps somebody,

CC

Hi Christian,

We've realized that this is a big issue for us: in our initial testing we either were setting up systems one-on-one or for ourselves, but we thought that our configuration setup with administrative accounts would be inherited by other users on the machine.  This apparently is not the case, and as we have a large number of users who float between stations, the logistics of getting them all configured looks pretty daunting.

Do you have any advice for how this might be pushed out to users remotely, or automatically, or at least how to perhaps import settings into the registry?

Thanks,

Gawain

Hi Christian,

We've realized that this is a big issue for us: in our initial testing we either were setting up systems one-on-one or for ourselves, but we thought that our configuration setup with administrative accounts would be inherited by other users on the machine.  This apparently is not the case, and as we have a large number of users who float between stations, the logistics of getting them all configured looks pretty daunting.

Do you have any advice for how this might be pushed out to users remotely, or automatically, or at least how to perhaps import settings into the registry?

Thanks,

Gawain

We did get most of the RAMP settings pushed out after a little research and sniffing through the MSI with ORCA. There is a way to export settings so you don't have to mess with a RegEdit directly. Here's how we did it:

* Install 2X on your pilot PC.

* Configure the global RAMP settings: primary, secondary, etc.

* In the 2X Client, go to File-->Export Settings..., and save the file as 2XSettings.2xc.

* Place the exported settings in the same folder as your 2X Client installer MSI.

Now, if you run the installer, it should install the client, and when you open 2X, your connection settings should appear. The only issue we had on the Win7 x64 PCs was that the Domain info would not come in for some reason, even though it was configured. And we didn't customize usernames during deployment -- we just had our users enter those in for the first time.

The only other modification I did was to use ORCA to edit the MSI itself so that single sign-on (SSO) was disabled. Oh, and also to disable the version-checking. I found the properties to change in the manual, and I don't recall it being too awful.

Hope this is clear, but if you've got any questions, let me know.

EDIT TO ADD:

As for installing remotely, we did it via Group Policy Assigned Applications, so if your PCs are all in a Domain and you're not using some other system management product, that's what I'd recommend. Or I'm sure it can be done with batch scripts, too. We can do go over that off-line if you need help with that.

Christian,

Thanks for all the tips, we'll be looking into it.  Right now we've just got a configuration export file on our shared drive and users have instructions for loading it themselves when they are logging in to RAMP on a new machine for the first time, which works, but obviously we want a cleaner solution in the future.

Couple of questions:  Do I understand correctly that if you do this trick for having the MSI pick up the config file, it doesn't manage to catch the domain or the option to not check for updates, but the latter you could manage directly through Orca?

Second, when using the configurations import we had a strange issue with a small number of users:  if they were first time users (i.e. they had a password that had to be changed on login), they would not be able to log in (they would be repeatedly told they had a bad username/password.  If, however, someone who had changed their password already tried to log in, it would work properly for them.  Then the previous user would be able to log in, getting the password change dialog.  It was very strange, and has happened to about a quarter of our users so far.

Yes, the MSI ORCA edit disabled update notifications as we wanted. I don't believe we could do that through the settings. And the domain info is in the settings file (which is just XML, so you can open it with a text editor if you like), but it wasn't applied on Win7 x64. No idea why, but it was just easier to fix by making it part of the new user setup procedure for us.

I'm afraid I can't help you on the config import issue. We didn't experience that issue here at all.