How to stop Adobe Flash Player checking for updates?

Content Authoring
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(imported topic written by GregL91)

Adobe suggest using AutoUpdateDisable=1 in the mms.cfg file, but this does not appear to work.

Need to set this on 800+ machines

Thanks

Greg

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(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

That’s pretty funny-- I was just looking into the same thing last week. According to the Administration Guide for Flash Player, you have to save the file in UTF-8 format with the BOM. I wanted to try to write the file out with “createfile”, but it will use ANSI instead of UTF-8. I haven’t looked at it again yet, but I am probably going to just put the txt file in UTF-8 format out on a server and have the action download it. Let me know if you give it a try and what happens…I’ll do like wise if I get to it first. Any ideas are welcome from others as well. Thanks.

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(imported comment written by MattBoyd)

It seems like file encoding is becoming a bigger issue lately…

If you have Powershell installed, you could try a command like this to change the file encoding:

Powershell "gc tempfile.cfg | Out-File -en utf8 mms.cfg"

tempfile.cfg represents the configuration file that you created, but is in ANSI format.

By the way, I couldn’t find a way to do it with regular DOS commands. If anyone has a DOS command that will do this, that would be great. I think it can also be done with a VBScript using FileSystemObject, but I haven’t tried.

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(imported comment written by GregL91)

I’ve tried simply creating the file with Notepad and this allows you to save it in UTF-8. But it doesn’t appear to work.

Why can’t Adobe just add a simple Reg key as they do with Reader to disable updates?!?!

Cheers

Greg

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(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Greg-

How are you testing to see if it works? Apparently if you have that file, it overrides any settings that are in the application, but doesn’t actually change what is showing up in the control panel. I do agree, this would be much better managed through registry settings or group policy, but it appears this is legacy Macromedia functionality. The documentation recommends using a protocol analyzer to verify the setting is working. What complicates it further is that by default, the application will only check once a week, so it is difficult to tell if it is not checking at all, or it has already done its check for the week. Seems like the only way to truly test would be on a vanilla machine with Wireshark installed. This really is much more complicate that it should be…

Boyd-

Thanks for the PowerShell code-- I had been meaning to check up on it. We’re planning on deploying PowerShell 2 to all of our machines once we have SP3 rolled out to all of our XP boxes. It should be a nice supplement to use in action script.

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(imported comment written by GregL91)

Boyd - Thanks for the Power Shell script, that seems to do the trick

Brian - If you use:

AutoUpdateDisable=0

AutoUpdateInterval=0

in the mms.cfg file, it forces Flash Player to check for updates. Usually works after a reboot.

Thanks for you help

Greg