Rainer, thanks for your information, however I understand how WPKG works, and the WPKG client 1.3.9 is definitely supposed to be able to read from STDIN and support /sendStatus 21-Sep-2009 WPKG Client 1.3.9 has been released. Small summary (not to be complete): * 32-bit and 64-bit client versions * support for /sendStatus switch of wpkg.js 1.1.x (display the progress in the message window) The question is, why doesn't it work? It certainly has nothing to do with VC++. I'm thinking it is more to do with a service that our Group Policy is blocking. Are there dependant services required? Regarding logon/shutdown delay, this is most certainly a required feature, for a number of reasons: 1) Much of our software requires a reboot. We simply cannot automatically reboot production users during the day, no matter how much "warning" you give people. 2) Much of our software takes 5-10 minutes to install, however the icons sometimes become available before installation completes. Hence, users can "run" the software before its finished installing, and it will crash, sometimes ruining the actual installation. 3) Installing software slows down the computer and network connection, thus interfering with production users. I am curious if Windows 7 will support logon delay, or at least shutdown delay. Status messages are more important if we use the Execute at System start-up, but we could easily swap to Execute on shutdown. However Execute on shutdown will of coarse only work with a shutdown delay :) We will be migrating our 300 users to Windows 7 in the near future, so WPKG compatibility with that is quite an important factor... I guess we need to start testing. ________________________________ From: Peter Gough [mailto:pmgough at gmail.com] Sent: Friday, 5 February 2010 6:55 PM To: Rainer Meier Cc: wpkg-users at lists.wpkg.org Subject: Re: [wpkg-users] /sendStatus command not working Many thanks for the clarification. I've played around again with this today and it looks like adding '/sendStatus' to the command line options in WPKG Client and setting the sendStatus value to 'true' in the 'settings.xml' file on the server gives me information messages together with the regular message box. This is on Windows XP SP3 clients using 1.3.6 WPKG Client. I've tried updating my test clients to 1.3.9 but get an error messsage relating to the WPKG service. I understand from previous correspondance that there are known issues with this version on SP3 - hopefully these will be ironed out at some stage in the future but I'm pretty happy for the time being with what I've got working. Many thanks for all of your hard work in providing WPKG; it really is much appreciated! Peter On 5 February 2010 17:12, Rainer Meier <r.meier at wpkg.org> wrote: Hi Peter, On 05.02.2010 01:34, Peter Gough wrote: > I just wondered if you couid confirm what your users see on the screen > when the workstation is shutting down. I've never been able to get > anything to display apart from the alternating status messages despite > trying to set this up as you have described. > > I've got this set in the Client's WPKG parameters: > > /synchronize /nonotify /quiet > > I've got the WPKG user interface dialog box unticked and I've set > sendStatus value in the config.xml file on my server to 'true'. > > Any thoughts? First a few words for better understanding. WPKG is split into a "Server" and a "Client" Part. The Server-Part is implemented in wpkg.js. Well, actually it's not a real server but rather a script executed on the client. The Client part is "WPKG Client" which just executes wpkg.js depending on your settings. WPKG Client is optional and you might also invoke wpkg.js using any other method. However WPKG Client offers a couple of nice features like running wpkg.js at startup/shutdown or blocking user input during wpkg.js execution. Such features need to be implemented on a quite low level in the operating system. Currently logon delay only works on Windows prior to Vista. The logon delay feature allows you to display messages (alternating) to the user. It was intended to extend this static message display into a dynamic status update shown to the user. However there are a couple of technical limitations. First of all wpkg.js will have to communicate with WPKG client in order to update the status displayed to the user. Remember: wpkg.js executes the job and WPKG client prevents user input and displays messages. Unfortunately IPC technologies are quite limited from WSH/JScript. So for the moment wpkg.js only supports writing the status updates to STDOUT if /sendStatus is enabled (or sendStatus within config.xml is switched on). Honestly I am not fully sure if WPKG Client already supports reading from STDIN and showing these messages to the user. Personally I prefer not to block users and run WPKG silently in the background. Another reason for me is that logon/shutdown delay is not something easily achievable by standard API and as Vista shows it might be even blocked/prevented by the OS. I am using /sendStatus usually when I run WPKG from a memory-stick to update offline nodes. So I can see the progress of package installation within the console window. So please note that config.xml controls behavior or wpkg.js but sendStatus will only make wpkg.js to print status information to the console. If this information is picked up and displayed to the user depends on the method used to run wpkg.js (console, client application which picks up the output). br, Rainer -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.wpkg.org/pipermail/wpkg-users/attachments/20100208/b61c09f5/attachment.html> |