Dwarfsoft [GPA]

I have recently been building quite a few MSI packages, and as of the end of last week I was required to go back through and rebuild a whole batch of them. Due to the way a lot of deployments work from Novell Zenworks, Product Codes are used quite frequently to stop the MSI from installing more than once (thereby disabling multiple installs). I believe that this is due to the MSI Template that is used corporately having a few Dialogs missing for Repair/Modify. Therefore when the second install occurs the MSI dies a painful death and the user is presented with a number of errors.

So, rather than fix the source of the problem I work within the structure I am given. After my forays in the past couple of days I found it immensely frustrating trying to get the Product Code key to update our documentation for each MSI which had been rebuilt. This is because, up until now, I had been installing the MSI and searching for the MSI name under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Product\. The code displayed under this key had confused me for quite some time until I found some information regarding a “Packed GUID“.

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I had started another post on Group Policy editing, and how the Policy files are structured, and how to use and improve on the existing Group Policy Editor tool. The post has been found to be far too epic, so I have decided to cover a smaller subset of recent finds.

As everybody is probably already aware, we use Novell ConsoleOne and Zenworks where I work. ConsoleOne has some interesting features that require that whenever a Group Policy is being edited it takes over as the policy on the machine that is editing it. Rather than have a useful tool like Microsofts Group Policy Management Console, Novell likes to replace the local Group Policy and then just run gpedit.msc. Which is where my first gripe about gpedit.msc comes in:

GPEdit.msc requires line by line entry of things like, for example, port exceptions and program exceptions for the Windows Firewall. This is usually not an issue except that, as I have discussed in previous posts, we have been moving towards a Windows Domain environment. Firewall Exception rules are configured within two places in Group Policy: Domain Profile and Standard Profile. I have found that there is a need to move our current Standard Profile settings across to the Domain Profile settings. After a bit of registry searching I found a neat trick for doing exactly that.

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