[wpkg-users] ++Mailshell: Re: wpkg via Group Policies

[grubi]

Hi Tomasz.
> Yeah, I too use GPO for some WPKG setups.
> Would be great to know how you do it.
Usage is quite easy:
You put the following lines in the GPO startup script

%WPKGPATH%\wpkgMessage.exe
%WPKGPATH%\wpkg.js /synchronize
%WPKGPATH%\wpkgMessage.exe /terminate

Within every package you add the following call
as first installation command:

%WPKGPATH%\wpkgMessage.exe /package <package descriptive name>
Example: %WPKGPATH%\wpkgMessage.exe /package "Internet Explorer"

That's it.


> I'm not familiar with that - could you say some more about it?

Mailslots is a Windows inter process communication mechanism which
is available via Win32 API. One program opens a mail slot with a system
wide unique name and other programs can open it and post whatever
they want. Once you have a mailslot handle you use the normal filehandling
API calls to read and write.

What I do is I open a specific mailslot when wpkgMessage is called first
without arguments and check for incoming notifications regulary.
When wpkgMessage is called with the /package parameter I try
to open the mailslot from that instance of the program and if successful
submit the information which package is beeing installed.

If wpkg directly would try to open a specific mailslot whenever it starts
to process a new package a programm like wpkg service or any other
could open that mailslot before calling wpkg and could receive
status and progress information.

I put wpkgMessage to our ftp server including source code.
It is written in C++ for Borland BCB..
You will find it here: ftp://ftp.gig-mbh.de/software/wpkgMessage.zip

If you have any further questions please let me know.

grubi