Support

Technote 033
Adobe CS Deployment Options

Problem:

How do I distribute Adobe CS?

Solution:

LANrev 5.0.1 introduced direct deployment support for both Adobe CS 3/4 installers and patches. If a software package is assigned a payload containing an Adobe CS 3/4 installer or updater, the Adobe CS Options tab becomes available for the package definition. This extra tab lets you set special options for installing, uninstalling, or updating the Adobe Creative Suite. However, there may be certain circumstances under which you may not be able to use this feature in LANrev. This document outlines the different options for deploying Adobe CS depending on your requirements.

Option 1 (CS3 & CS4) - Use the built-in LANrev Adobe CS direct deployment support.

Benefit - Straightforward with minimal preparation, takes advantage of LANrev's distributed staging server architecture.
Disadvantages - Clients must have enough free disk space to hold installation files plus installed application suite itself, although the installer files will be removed after the installation is finished. 

If you pick a payload that contains installer files for Adobe CS 3/4 for a package definition in the Software Distribution area of the Server Center, an extra Adobe CS Options tab will appear in the package definition screens. You can specify both volume and retail serial numbers in the Adobe CS Options tab. When uploading the installation payload you need to

  1. Place all of the Adobe CS installation files in a folder with a short name not exceeding 3 characters like "CS3" or CS4". This also applies to installation files for Adobe updates as well. This is because the path to the installation files in Windows must be less than 256 characters. The path to where the agent temporarily stores the installation files combined with the internal paths within the Adobe installation files themselves can exceed this limit if you do not keep the folder name short.
  2. Be sure you pick the Setup file as the payload executable.
  3. If the installation media is spread out over several discs, copy the contents of all the discs into a single folder and replace any duplicate files.
  4. In versions of LANrev prior to 5.1, there is a hard timeout of 30 minutes on the master staging server when waiting for a payload. Because the Adobe CS 3/4 Master Suite can be quite large (> 12GB) in size, the time it takes for the admin console to compress and encrypt the installer payload before upload can exceed this time limit. If this happens upload the installation payload from an admin console on the fastest available machine to reduce the compression and encryption time as much as possible.
  5. The CS 4 installation requires that you enter a serial number in the Adobe CS Options tab or the deployment will fail. CS 3 does not and lets you to enter a serial number the first time an application from the suite is launched.
  6. For Mac installations you must check "Requires admin privileges" checkbox in the "Installation Options" tab. For Windows installations the "Installation user context" must be set to "System account user" or some other user with local admin privileges on the target machine.

Option 2 (CS4 only) - Use the UberInstaller described in the Adobe Deployment Toolkit

Benefit - Can be run from a network share so only requires enough free disk space to hold the installed application suite itself.
Disadvantages - Requires more preparation, doesn't take advantage of LANrev's distributed staging server architecture, only available to customers with a volume licensed copy of Adobe CS4.

To deploy Adobe CS4 with the Execute Mac File or Execute Windows File command from a network share with the AdobeUberInstaller you must

  1. Create a single installer according to the Deployment Toolkit documentation.
  2. Run the Deployment Toolkit as outlined in the documentation to pre-configure the the installation including volume serial number, installation options, and components to install.
  3. Copy the installer files and AdobeUberInstaller executable to a network share.
  4. Trigger the AdobeUbeInstallerSchedule to run from the network share with "Execute Mac File" or "Execute Windows File" with the "Launch from server" or "Launch using server URL". For Mac installations be sure to enable the "Executable requires administrative privileges" checkbox. For Windows installations set the "Execute as" option to either "System account user" or an account with admin privileges on the target.

Option 3 (CS3 & CS4) -Deploy the Adobe CS suite as outlined in the deployment guides for CS3 and CS4

Benefit - Can be run from a network share so only requires enough free disk space to hold the installed application suite itself.
Disadvantages - Requires more preparation, doesn't take advantage of LANrev's distributed staging server architecture.

To deploy Adobe CS 3/4 with the Execute Mac File or Execute Windows File command from a network share you must

  1. Run the Adobe CS 3/4 Setup application with the "--record=1" option to generate an install.xml that tells the installer which components to install.
  2. Create an application.xml.override file as outlined in the deployment guides to specify installation options.
  3. Create a single installer according to the the deployment guides and place it on a network share (Mac installer must be hosted on an AFP and not SMB share).
  4. Copy the install.xml file and application.xml.override file to the the same location as the Setup application on the network share.
  5. Create a shell script to mount the AFP share and initiate the installation (Mac) or a BAT script trigger the installation via a UNC path (Windows).
    Mac ==> <network_volume_mount_path>/Setup.app/Contents/MacOS/Setup --mode=silent --skipProcessCheck=1 deploymentFile=<network_volume_mount_path>/install.xml
    Windows ==> \\<UNC_path>\setup.exe" --mode=silent --skipProcessCheck=1 --deploymentFile="\\<UNC_path>\install.xml"
  6. Run these scripts from the network share with "Execute Mac File" or "Execute Windows File" with the "Install and launch" option. For Mac installations be sure to enable the "Executable requires administrative privileges" checkbox. For Windows installations set the "Execute as" option to either "System account user" or an account with admin privileges on the target.

Troubleshooting

If the Adobe CS 3/4 installation fails for any reason check the the Adobe installer logs to find out what may have happened. They can be found at "\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Installers" on Windows and "/Library/Logs/Adobe/Installers" on Mac OS X. Please see the following Adobe KB article for more information.

 

Date: 3 March 2009
Revised: n/a
Components: Admin
Version: 5.0.1 and higher

 

 
...
...