We have deployed a new update for Adobe Shockwave 12.1.6.156 in Windows 8 but its forcing some machines to reboot automatically even though the action is only set to prompt users to do this. Looking at the relevance there is a reg check and 2 possible versions of the update ie slim and full.
Action 1 - Bigfix script is as follows:-
if {exists key whose (name of it contains “Shockwave” and exists key “InstallType” whose (not (value of it as string as lowercase contains “slim”)) of it ) of key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe” of registry}
action may require restart “50aee74b456eb07d9e4301c1e58ad66521e81a05”
endif
The full version installed on some machines and users only got prompt to reboot BUT most got the slim update and rebooted immediately.
So I have a couple of questions:-
Why are there 2 updates necessary and what is the difference?
Is the reg key path correct for W8 x64 OS - shouldnt it be HKLM\Software\Wow6432node\Adobe?
Lastly, if we think there is a problem with a generic update how/who do I raise this with and what are the SLAs?
It seems like there may be a new command line option to suppress the reboot that is missing, or this is a behavior change on Adobe’s part.
The regpath is correct.
This will actually resolve to different paths depending on if it is a x64 bit machine or a x32 bit machine, so the same relevance can be used for both. (which is useful)
key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe" of registry
The reason for this is x64 Windows has something called Windows on Windows Redirection. Basically what this means is that any 32bit application automatically gets redirected to the x32 bit registry path and system files, even though it is requesting the path that actually matches the x64 bit location. A x32 bit application can actually make a system call to disable this redirection and access the x64 bit locations directly. This is what the BES Client does if you use “x64 registry” instead of “registry”.
The whole concept of Windows on Windows redirection is very confusing at times and took me about a year to become comfortable with, but this is something of Microsoft’s design and affects everything on windows including BigFix / IBM Endpoint Manager.
There are 4 different ways to access the registry using relevance:
This will always point to x32 registry locations:
registry
This is exactly the same as “registry”:
x32 registry
This is will access the x64 bit locations in the registry and throw an error on 32bit systems: (it just disables WOW redirection)
x64 registry
This will access the x64 bit locations on an x64 bit system and the x32 bit locations on an x32 bit system:
native registry
If you don’t care which registry something is located in, then I would recommend using the following:
keys of (x64 registries; x32 registries)
This will always check both registries on x64 bit systems, but only check the x32 registry on 32 bit systems. (because there is only 1 of them)
Unless the slim update actually did the reboot it shouldn’t restart automatically if the is a user logged on and you set the action that way.
If when you took the action you did a Post Action type of command, you should see this in the statement “Before restarting, show the following message to active users” so there has to be an active user logged in to stop the reboot.
That being said, setting an action like this to restart every time it finishes might be severely overkill. The “action may require restart” will check to see if a restart is needed and make the “pending restart” relevance go to the true state only if one is needed.
Yeah…it does that. That’s why the Shockwave fixlet does not have a default action. If you read the Description tab on the fixlet, there’s a warning that the Shockwave installer sometimes forces systems to reboot without notice.
As @JasonWalker has mentioned, there’s warning in the fixlet’s description that SW sometimes forces restart.
The action script uses /S command to force an unattended installation.
But I couldn’t find any command to suppress the reboot yet.
and then you can install the package with /norestart switch…
Slim version is totally broken. The installer tries to uninstall files that don’t exist! (I’m writing about windows 8 x64 version). Do they test their packages? How can prepare packages that force reboot without any way to stop it?
Does anybody have any idea what is the condition for the forced reboot?