SMS + Software Distribution to Terminal Servers

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SMS + Software Distribution to Terminal Servers

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All Forums >> [Management Products] >> Microsoft Systems Management Server >> SMS 2003 >> SMS + Software Distribution to Terminal Servers

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SMS + Software Distribution to Terminal Servers - 9/22/2008 7:22:54 AM

fault

Posts: 34
Score: 2
Joined: 7/21/2008
Status: offline

Hey all,

Just wondering whether anyone out there performs software distribution to Terminal Servers? If you do, I have to ask, how do you handle the taboo topic of change user /install & change user /execute?

I've read articles where the author says this isn't strictly required anymore on Windows Server 2003 (with Terminal Services) as it's smart enough to detect when software installation is taking place and automatically switches mode, but I can't find any documentation on this from Microsoft? Others swear by executing the above two commands everytime they perform software installation on a Terminal Server.

We run two Citrix farms specifically and while Citrix offers the Installation Manager, I don't want to use it if we can stick with our SMS deployment.

(I'm not sure how Installation Manager handles the mode switching either. I assume it either has some builtin functionality to do the mode switch prior to and after software installation. Or because it uses Windows Installer (MSIs), it leverages the aforementioned builtin smarts to detect that software installation is taking place and lets Windows handles it? Pure speculation...)

If anyone can shed some light on their knowledge/experience on this topic, that'd be super... :)

Of course, I could just wrap all my packages around a vbscript that does the mode switching for me, but that requires modification to all my packages. Or I could run a program for change user /install prior to assigning my advertisement but running a program for change user /execute after the advertisement is a little tricky? It seems to get very messy/ugly pretty quickly...

Post #: 1

RE: SMS + Software Distribution to Terminal Servers - 9/22/2008 10:15:34 AM

mhudson

Posts: 542
Score: 12
Joined: 4/1/2007
From: College Station, TX
Status: offline

We did use SMS 2003 to our 2003 Terminal Server. We didn't have to do anything special. We just send the adv down to the machine like any other XP. Of course when it is installing an optional install that 2 users need it just fails for one since you can't run 2 misiexec at the same time. We limit what can install to the TS since some require restarts and these we just do manually. I login as the admin, install, restart, done.

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(in reply to fault)

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RE: SMS + Software Distribution to Terminal Servers - 9/23/2008 9:52:33 AM

pwstrain

Posts: 122
Score: 9
Joined: 3/11/2007
From: Danville, Illinois
Status: offline

Same here. We try to schedule application installs just before or after server reboots (our Terminal Servers still do daily reboots at 3:00am). You've got to be sure and expire the advert if you do that, otherwise if a new server shows up in the collection it could run in the middle of the day and restart a server. Not that that's ever happened to me or anything.

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