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06/25/10 |
   
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How to Report Result of Installation in Active Directory DeploymentOne of the major drawbacks of deploying by GPO is complete lack of any centralized reporting. After the deployment, there are two ways to find out if it was successful – by looking into event log, and by looking into the log of the installation itself, provided that it was enabled by group policy. Obviously, this is a major drawback. Deployment systems like SMS provide reporting by means of their agent deployed at each workstation. The agent launches the installation, watches it, and then reports return code to the central server where it can be then analyzed. There is however another way to provide the reporting – by inserting custom actions in the installation script. In this article, we will show how to build such reporting system using transform applied to the installation package The actions will be reporting state of the installation to our database. We will need 3 actions – one in the beginning will be reporting installation start; two in the end will be reporting installation success or failure. For starters, we will need the database table to report to. In this article, we will be using SQL Server, but of course it can be any database – just the matter of connection string. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[_GPOInstallations] (id] [int] IDENTITY (1, 1) NOT NULL , [machine] [varchar] (50) NOT NULL , [username] [varchar] (50) NOT NULL , [product] [varchar] (50) NOT NULL , [version] [varchar] (50) NOT NULL , [started] [datetime] NULL , [finished] [datetime] NULL , [commited] [bit] NULL , [rolledback] [bit] NULL , [ResultingState] [tinyint] NULL ) Here’s the plan. Our first custom action will create new record in the database; we will get back newly created record id and store it in a property. In the end of deferred execution, we will place two more custom actions – one will run in case of commit, reporting success, another in case of rollback, reporting the failure. Here’s the code in vbscript of the whole script. function dbRegStart() On Error Resume Next If Session.Property("REMOVE") = "ALL" Then State = 0 else State = 1 end if Set cn=createobject("adodb.connection") cn.open "Provider=SQLOLEDB;Integrated Security=SSPI;Initial Catalog=MYDB;Data Source=MYSERVER" ProductName = Session.Property("ProductName") ProductVersion = Session.Property("ProductVersion")
Set rs= cn.execute("insert into _GPOInstallations(product,version,Started, ResultingState)
select '" & ProductName & "','" & ProductVersion & "',getdate(), " & state & " ; select
scope_identity()") Set rs=rs.nextrecordset NewId=cstr(rs(0)) rs.close cn.close set cn=nothing Session.Property("DBNewID") = NewId Session.Property("DBRegCommit") = NewId Session.Property("DBRegRollback") = NewId end function
Function DBRegCommit() On Error Resume Next NewId = Session.Property("CustomActionData") If isnumeric(NewId) Then Set cn=createobject("adodb.connection") cn.open "Provider=SQLOLEDB.1;Integrated Security=SSPI;Initial Catalog=MYDB;Data
Source=MYSERVER" cn.execute "update _GPOInstallations set Finished=getdate(), commited=1 where id=" &
newid cn.close Set cn=Nothing End If end function
Function DBRegRollback() On Error Resume Next NewId = Session.Property("CustomActionData") If isnumeric(NewId) Then Set cn=createobject("adodb.connection") cn.open "Provider=SQLOLEDB;Integrated Security=SSPI;Initial Catalog=MYDB;Data
Source=MYSERVER" If Session.Property("REMOVE") = "ALL" Then State = 0 else State = 1 End If cn.execute "update _GPOInstallations set Finished=getdate(), rolledback=1 where id=" &
Session.Property("CustomActionData") cn.close Set cn=Nothing End If end function
The first function, dbRegStart, will be called in the beginning of the execute sequence; functions dbRegCommit and dbRegRollback in the end of the deferred execution - because only then it becomes known whether the installation was committed or rolled back. Here’s how to insert custom actions in ORCA. First, we save the text of the above vbscript in a text file, for example c:\dbReg.vbs. We open the original MSI, and start new transform; we then go to the table Binary, and add new row; give it any name, for instance, dbreg1. Then focus the row “Data” and specify filename of the saved script, c:\dbreg.vbs . ORCA will read the file contents into the table.
Now we go to the table CustomAction. Here, we create three custom actions:
All 3 refer in the column Source to the Name we gave in the Binary table; type 6 indicated regular custom action; type 1542 and 1286 respectively specify execution on Commit and on Rollback in the deferred phase. Column Target points to the respective function within our vbscript. Finally, we insert out custom actions into the right places in the script.
Assuming that the very first action in the original execute sequence had sequence number 100, we place “DBRegStart” before it, i.e. 90; we place DBRegCommit and DBRegRollback right before InstallFinalize. Then we generate new transform in ORCA, and apply it to the original MSI when deploying (tab “Modifications” in the package dialog in the group policy). Once the package is installed or uninstalled, new record will appear in our database with the name of the machine, product, version, and result of the installation. Using trivial SQL query against the database, it’s then easy to spot workstations where the installation has failed:
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