[wpkg-users] How to remove the package but leave the software installed

[Kevin Keane]

David,

You are right, of course - that's why I said to immediately reboot within the script. Come to think about it, you might also have to kill the WPKG process since rebooting takes a while.

Rainer's solution is of course even better. Hardly surprising since he's the expert...

I have a similar feature request myself - actually, the same feature request on the opposite end. Your feature should probably be called "make package unmanaged without remove". Mine would be called "make package managed without install".

The use case for that would be to remove software that is not yet managed. Currently, the recommendation is to call a script, but that runs into trouble when you want to selectively remove certain software only on some workstations. Example is to remove unauthorized copies of Microsoft Office (where the employee might have installed his own copy of Home & Student) while leaving authorized licensed copies intact. That is very difficult to accomplish with a script because a script wouldn't have access to the wpkg.xml file.

This should be an attribute in the profile, since usually one would only want a few packages to become managed or unmanaged that way.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Petterson [mailto:david at ifm.liu.se] 
Sent: Sunday, July 04, 2010 2:48 AM
To: Kevin Keane
Cc: wpkg-users at lists.wpkg.org
Subject: Re: [wpkg-users] How to remove the package but leave the software installed

I have tried that in a "run once"-package before. And unless things have changed, you can not use wpkg to remove the wpkg.xml, because it will be read into memory before execution, and re-written after.

However, I could use a startup-script to do the same.
I'll just have do do some testing first. :)

It would be great if wpkg could have "remove package and don't run remove flag" as an option.


Kevin Keane wrote:
> You could add a package that unconditionally calls a batch file. Give it a high priority so it executes first.
> 
> This batch file should do the following:
> 
> - Check if %SystemRoot%\System32\wpkg.xml contains information about 
> Windows updates (hint: findstr.exe may help you here)
> - If not, exit
> - If it does:
> - delete %SystemRoot%\System32\wpkg.xml
> - reboot (to prevent the WPKG from using what it may have already read 
> from wpkg.xml
> 
> The next time wpkg runs, it will rebuild the wpkg.xml file from scratch.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wpkg-users-bounces at lists.wpkg.org 
> [mailto:wpkg-users-bounces at lists.wpkg.org] On Behalf Of David 
> Petterson
> Sent: Saturday, July 03, 2010 4:40 PM
> To: wpkg-users at lists.wpkg.org
> Subject: [wpkg-users] How to remove the package but leave the software 
> installed
> 
> I have been using WPKG to force installation of Windows XP updates, and are now switching to a WSUS server.
> 
> So the question for you all:
> Is there a way to force remove the package information from the clients without running any remove commands?
> 
> Solutions I have though of and why they wont work.
> 
> 1.
> Solution: Remove the packages from the computer profiles.
> 
> Problem: I have made "remove" entries for all updates (sometime it is not good to do things the right way). If I just remove the package from the computer profile, the updates will be removed, the users annoyed by the computer beeing slow for too long and I will be hunted down.
> 
> 2.
> Solution: Create a new revision of all packages and remove the "remove"-entries. Then after all clients have got the new revision, remove the packages from the computer profile and remove/rename the packages to force removal of the package on the client.
> 
> Problem: We have a lot of users working on laptops, some are away for 
> months (up to a year in some cases) and I have no idea when all 
> computers have received the updated packages. (this was the first 
> reason why I started to use WPKG to force install updates on the 
> computers when they get back to campus. With WSUS I can force install 
> critical updates by setting a deadline)
> 
> 
> /David
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --- wpkg-users mailing list archives >> 
> http://lists.wpkg.org/pipermail/wpkg-users/
> _______________________________________________
> wpkg-users mailing list
> wpkg-users at lists.wpkg.org
> http://lists.wpkg.org/mailman/listinfo/wpkg-users
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---