Launch program interactively on machines

[jagablack]

Doug,

I have a program that is unable to be run quietly… i.e. I have to manually click through a wizard on a group of machines. Is there a way to run a program interactively on each RDP session, just kick it off remotely on a bunch using batchpatch? Would save some time. Thanks!

[jagablack]

For example, I am doing netapp_windows_host_utilities_6.0.2_x64.msi and then ntap_win_mpio_4.1_setup_x64.msi, and SnapDrive7.0.3_x64.exe. Let me know if questions.

[doug]

Well, you might be able to accomplish this, but there are some caveats.

The Deployment feature of BatchPatch will not allow you to execute the remote process interactively.

However, Remote Commands 1 and 2 do support psexec switches, and so they WILL let you specify the -i switch to execute processes interactively. That said, the file to execute would have to already exist on the target machine (or you might be able to use the psexec -c switch to get the file there – haven’t tested it).

There are a couple of things to be aware of if you try this…

First, if you use -i without also specifying -d, then psexec and consequently BatchPatch will wait for the process to complete. You probably don’t want this, so you would generally want to use -d in addition to -i. When you do this the exit code that appears in BatchPatch should be the PID of the remote process.

Second, the way Windows deals with multiple desktop sessions can give you unwanted results. For example, if you use -i to execute a process interactively on a non-server OS, like Windows 7, it will work as expected if you’re sitting at the console. But if you are using an RDP session to the Windows 7 machine, you probably will not see the process, and instead it will still run hidden. On a server OS you might be able to deal with this by connecting to the console session using the /admin switch in the RDP client. However, I’m not positive if this will work, so you’ll want to test.

I hope this helps.

-Doug

[jagablack]

Thanks Doug, these are good points. I will do some testing.

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