[wpkg-users] WPKG Timeout problem

[Malte Starostik]

Hi Luca,

I'm still investigating what exactly happens here.  But what I can tell so far 
is that the .exe installer calls "home" (with no user-visible notification 
about that btw, which I consider pretty rude) before doing anything else.  
Plus - and I'm not sure about this, yet - it ignores the properties you pass 
it.  IEXPLORER=1 MOZILLA=1 is deprecated anyway and by default both are 
installed.  ADDLOCAL=ALL and REBOOT=Suppress seem to be honored.
However, JAVAUPDATE=0 JU=0 AUTOUPDATECHECK=0 seem to not really make it.  That 
is, they get written to the registry but the autoupdater will still be 
installed and activated from what I've seen so far.
A more reliable way is to use the MSI package instead - start the setup 
interactively and grab the files from %AppData%.  When you pass those updater 
related properties to msiexec, they seem to be honored.  Plus this way it will 
not call home in the beginning!  There is still a connection to 
sjremetrics.java.com where it will get a unique id - apparently this server 
provides Sun with some statistics about JRE installations - again quite a rude 
thing to do, I haven't looked at their EULA/ToU/whatever if this behaviour is 
documented...together with Sun's bundling of the Yahoo! toolbar some time ago, 
this JRE more and more smells like ugly spyware to me.
However there might be a way to block this tracking call home, too.  I'll 
definately get back to the list once I'm confident it really works.  In the 
meantime, switching from the .exe to the .msi might get you a step further and 
anyway reduce the network noise produced by this package.
This remaining connection happens right at the end of installation or maybe 
even after the installer exits, so it might be harmless to the execution of 
WPKG.  Some time later some JavaFX stuff will be downloaded.  Thus, I'm also 
looking for a way to disable that one.

As it is now, all those http(s) connections cause an authentication failure on 
our proxy as they run from the system account.  One way to solve the issue 
altogether might be to block the relevant URLs on the proxy w/o asking for 
authentication.  I'll consider such a solution if all else fails, but I'd 
prefer to prevent the connections locally instead.

No thanks to Sun for blatantly calling this POS installer "offline".

Kind regards,
Malte

PS: this package also *sometimes* fails when installing over an existing 
installation of the same version.  Best way to prevent this seems to always 
uninstall any instance of the same JRE version before installing.

Am Mittwoch, 3. Februar 2010 16:25:46 schrieb 
luca_manganelli at comune.trento.it:
> Hi,
> 
> I have WPKG configured to launch updates at shutdown.
> 
> The main problem is that it seems ignore the TIMEOUT flag. I have the JAVA
> package, and the WPKG "freezes" in this step:
> 
>         <install cmd='\\w2srv17\gposhr$\WPKG\java\jre-6u18-windows-i586.exe
> /s IEXPLORER=1 MOZILLA=1 ADDLOCAL=ALL REBOOT=Suppress JAVAUPDATE=0 JU=0
> AUTOUPDATECHECK=0 /l*v
> \\w2srv17\gposhr$\WPKG\log\%COMPUTERNAME%-java6u18.log' timeout="300" />
> 
> after 5 minutes WPKG doesn't "see the timeout" and takes forever to close.
> 
> The main problem is the java installer that tries to "call home" (we are in
> an environment that connects to internet through proxy), so we use the
> timeout to prevent this proxy problem.
> 
> Any idea to solve this problem?
> 
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