Upgrade non-MSI installs via GPO?

[joei]

Anyone know how to do this? A new install works fine but my GPO has no effect on machines with previous .exe versions. At first glance it appears you can only upgrade previoius .msi versions. Is this true?

[DraconPern]

Hum.. that should not be the case. The MSI should also detect the older .exe version and uninstall it.

[phumpal]

Not to bring up old issues but I'm having the same problem with the following package:

Firefox-2.0.0.3-en-US.msi

I'm using it to upgrade various version of Firefox. It will install perfectly fine on boxes that don't have Firefox installed but boxes that have previous versions of Firefox (using executables downloaded from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/).

The versions range from Firefox 1.0 all the way up to 2.0.0.2

Any ideas?

[phumpal]

To be more specific, lets say, Firefox 1.5 is installed on the client box. The user restarts their computer and the FrontMotion MSI installer runs on startup.

The user logs in and they still see that Firefox 1.5 is installed. You can open the Add/Remove programs dialog and you'll notice that both Firefox 1.5 and Firefox (en-US) are installed.

It looks like all the files have been updated, yet when you launch firefox and go to the "About Mozilla Firefox" menu item, it still says 1.5.

[xca4037]

If you look at the file versions for firefox.exe, you will find that 1.5.0.7 has
1.8.20060.25382 sh 7,190,637 09-27-2006 firefox.exe
and 2.0.0.3 has
0.0.0.0 shp 7,426,048 04-03-2007 firefox.exe
(or whatever a specific build may have). This results in installer to recognize the older version to have the higher version number, thus not replacing the file.

This beaviour is true for all exe, dll files that carry an internal version number. You may override this by editing the msi (orca e.g.), table "file", and manually changing the version number for all files to 65535.0.0.

sincerely.

Edit: I'm not sure wether an msi installer will be able to upgrade the original mozilla installs - for this, you need a silent uninstall... But you may remove the software entry with msicuu (contains msizap.exe, a handy tool that cleans the installer registry keys from unwanted software - when embedded in the msi in a custom action, it will remove all references to the mozilla install)

[DraconPern]

I am pretty sure the upgrade from a non-msi works. I just tried it via a manual install of the msi and via a GPO. The installer will try to find an install entry called 'Mozilla Firefox' and uninstall all the files from it. Curious, what language was the old install?

[xca4037]

Hi, draconpern.

All our installs are "handcrafted" msi-files (we started to deploy ff through msi with 1.0.3, when no german msi was available on the net - as far as i remember, it was hard to find _any_ msi).

With ff 2.00 we switched to ffce (gpo support rocks! ), where the exe itself lacks a version number. As you may notice, mozilla.org's ff 1.5.0.7 has a lower version number than 1.5.0.3, and so our custom msi at first did not update the exe file (already newer version present). This was when we introduced version number 65535 for all files in our msi package.

This is the filever output for the exe files we used:
ff_1.0.3 --a-- W32i DLL - 1.0.3.0 shp 6,630,505 04-15-2005 firefox.exe
ff_1.0.4 --a-- W32i DLL - 1.0.4.0 shp 6,631,017 05-11-2005 firefox.exe
ff_1.0.6 --a-- W32i DLL - 1.0.6.0 shp 6,636,649 07-17-2005 firefox.exe
ff_1.5.0.1 --a-- W32i DLL - 1.8.20060.11112 sh 7,166,053 02-08-2006 firefox.exe
ff_1.5.0.3 --a-- W32i DLL - 1.8.20060.42618 sh 7,172,197 05-09-2006 firefox.exe
ff_1.5.0.7 --a-- W32i DLL - 1.8.20060.25382 sh 7,190,637 09-27-2006 firefox.exe
ff_2.0 --a-- W32i DLL - 0.0.0.0 shp 7,405,568 11-15-2006 firefox.exe
ff_2.0.0.2 --a-- W32i DLL - 0.0.0.0 shp 7,426,048 03-20-2007 firefox.exe
ff_2.0.0.3 ----- W32i DLL - 0.0.0.0 shp 7,426,048 04-03-2007 firefox.exe

The same filever problem exists for accessiblemarshal.dll.

[DraconPern]

Ah, you mentioned handcrafted msi files and that's the problem. The solution is a bit tricky and may not work because it depends on your old MSI's. You will need to find the app code of your old msi and add it to the upgrade section in the new msi. [/list]