Cyber Armor Uninstallation

This issue has been solved. See solution.
nac's picture

Hi Friends

     I am in a strange situation over here. I want to uninstall Cyber Armor from the client machines. I have an image of client machine where I dont see any unisntallation information for Cyber Armor. Neither in INSTALLDIR nor in Registry Editor. Also Cyber Armor is not reflected in ARP. INSTALLDIR doesnt have any unwise.exe. I can not use MSI ZAP as Cyber  Armor is not in MSI format. Just removing File and registry information  from System would not be good. 
    This just leaves me helpless. I dont want to waste time in scripting to find out all the information related to cyber Armor and deleting it. Is there any other command line for uninstlaling Cyber Armor, ( As I mentioned there is no information in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall regarding uninstallation of Cyber Armor)

Please Suggest

EdT's picture

Maybe the software is not intended for uninstall?

Options:
1. Contact the manufacturer of the software and ask them about how the software is uninstalled. Perhaps it's as simple as deleting the files and any shortcuts?
2. Capture the install and engineer an uninstall yourself. That will at least tell you if any important system files are replaced, therefore leaving you with a risk of trashing the operating system in the event that the files are all removed. You won't be wasting your time if you do this properly, as it could avoid you later having to rebuild a pile of broken machines.

If your issue has been solved, please use the "Mark as Solution" link on the most relevant thread.

nac's picture

Thanks for suggestion

Thanks Mate but there is  a problem.

 1.  I already contacted Manufacturer. That solution wont work  as acording to them there should some uninstall information for uninstall.

 2.  Yes I know in what all locations Cyber Armor files get installed. But just now I just thought that if Cyber Armor services are started ( there are some services) then that wont allow me to delete files and registry directly. When I try to stop/delete service manually then it asks me for Password which is not possible to put on every machine manually( I have several thousands machines).

   Cyber Armor is a firewall
 

I dont know how IMPOSEBLE spells

VBScab's picture

>it asks me for a password

>it asks me for a password which is not possible to put on every machine
You're building an uninstall: why would you need to put the password on the target machines? It'll be inside the MSI. If you're even halfway inventive, you could encrypt it before its inclusion in the MSI and decrypt it on the fly as part of the service-stopping Custom Action.

Don't know why 'x' happened? Want to know why 'y' happened? Use ProcMon and it will tell you.
Think about using http://www.google.com before posting.

nac's picture

you could encrypt it before its inclusion in the MSI...

    Yes agreed my friend but this is a different case. When my script for stopping service will run, it will give me error no.5 Access denied (does this have to do something with dependent services?) . When I stop service through user interface of cyber armor then It will ask for password. ( Sorry for not writing last post in enough details). 

    This is the nice option that I would build an uninstallation package. The only hurdle I have is Stopping and removing services . I went through some articles online regarding the unstoppable services, but there is no enough information. I wont be able to remove all the files unless and untill these services are running. If I come to know exactly how these services are made unstoppable may be I would come to know about how to stop them. Deleting Services registry wont solve this issue. If I delete services registries then I will have to give reboot. to make other resources free. I dont want reboot in between

  I think I will have to change my tagline

I dont know how IMPOSEBLE spells

EdT's picture

Forgive me for stating the obvious...

If the manufacturer is telling you that there should be uninstall information available, then why don't you perform an install of the software on a test machine, identify the uninstall components, and then deploy them to your target machines, so that you can then run the uninstall that the manufacturer provides.

If your issue has been solved, please use the "Mark as Solution" link on the most relevant thread.

nac's picture

Its really obvious :) thanks for it though

That was the first thing I tried to do.

we dont have the source which will put the uninstallation information. Whatever source we have is already packaged which doesnt put uninstallation information. However I am trying to get the basic source which will give me uninstallation information.

Let me come in broader way.

Uninstallation of Cyber Armor is a part of deployment of other antivirus application. I was trying to get uninstallation information from machines but to my badluck the package which have installed Cyber Armor have removed uninstallation information from the system. As I dont have basic source it has worsen the situation.

I was told by manufacturer that there should be one unwise.exe. Does this give any clue? also can we stop un-stoppable services?

I dont know how IMPOSEBLE spells

EdT's picture

No easy solution

Looks like your original install has had some content cleared out - unless the unwise.exe and the installation log - usually called install.log, have been installed to another folder.
So the first thing to do, if you've not already done it, is to search for unwise.exe and also any .log files on your system. HOWEVER, if the Uninstallstring entry is not present, then I would suspect that these files may have been deleted also. Was the original build designer or packager paranoid about not allowing this app to be removed??
The simplest way of removing the running services, or any locked file for that matter,  is to mark the associated files as "delete on next reboot" using the PendingFileRenameOperations key. That is what I would expect the unwise.exe uninstall to do. Then a reboot is forced, which causes the operating system to delete the marked files before it does anything else, during the boot time, so the service files are nuked before they get a chance to be restarted.
To get around the need to reboot (which may prove difficult, if not impossible), you would need to determine if there is a way to stop the services associated with this app - perhaps as you say, the order of stopping is important. If you can't find a way to stop the services manually, then realistically, nuking the service files during the early boot phase is the only way.

If your issue has been solved, please use the "Mark as Solution" link on the most relevant thread.

nac's picture

you would need to determine if there is a way to stop the servic

This is where I am strucked, I have tried all the options you have given before subject line, as I said this is prior part of deploying my antivirus application also users may be in logged on state; I can not give reboot.

You might have faced this issue , it would be great help if somebody knows the logic of stopping serice when it doesnt allow you to stop. Try to stop any antivirus service. it will give access denied error.
Yes setting delete flag on the service will delete the service on reboot.

There is some logic of creating unstoppable services. If that logic is revealed then might be we will get how to stop and kill them.

I dont know how IMPOSEBLE spells

nac's picture

EdT

Solution

hey I finally i got the source from Manufacturer. As the normal process of unwise.exe it created a log file during installation which i deployed and then uninstalled Cyber Armor.
to my wonder this log file worked for many other versions of cyber armor including vista version.

This leaves me with a thought; use of install.log for unwise.exe.

whats the use of install.log to unwise.exe?

( as I saw in cyber armor case one install.log file worked uninstallation of many cyber armor version's )

I dont know how IMPOSEBLE spells

EdT's picture

Install.log is a logfile of all install actions

Wisescript generates an installation logfile which records all installation actions. The default name is install.log.
Unwise.exe is the Wise executable which handles uninstall. It takes each step in the installation logfile, and reverses it, so any installed files are deleted, and any installed registry keys are also deleted. Note that as with all installers, the content of registry keys that already existed, and were overwritten during the install, are deleted during uninstall, but old content is not put back.

The Install.log is a text file - you can open it in Notepad or any other text editor and examine the installation steps recorded in there.

As for "unstoppable" services, like A/V programs, a little thought will tell you why they are made deliberately hard to stop. If they were easy to stop, any virus program could avoid detection simply by stopping the A/V service.
In other cases, a service may have a dependency on another service, and so the service cannot be stopped until the dependent service is stopped first..
The credentials under which the service is running can also be relevant - if the service is running in the localsystem context, your admin account may have insufficient privileges to stop the service - especially if the installer has changed the permissions on the file to exclude any user other than "system".

However, the native capabilities of the Wise uninstaller do not support this level of complexity, so I'm guessing that either the uninstall is running some sort of uninstaller associated with the service (in which case the install.log will have some sort of execute instruction in it), or the process of stopping the service is quite straightforward, and you've missed something when trying to do it manually.

If your issue has been solved, please use the "Mark as Solution" link on the most relevant thread.

nac's picture

Agreed regarding unstoppable services

Yes I understand why some services are unstoppable.

My new question was, how come same install.log uninstalled all the versions of my application.?

To be precise,

i have install.log file for Cyber Armor 3.5

now i used same install.log file to un-install 3.0,3.1,3.2,3.3 and 3.4

Do you mean to say whatever information is marked installed in install.log; unwise.exe will uninstall them irrespective of application version?

I dont know how IMPOSEBLE spells

VBScab's picture

Correct

The log is basically a file and registry list. No versioning whatsoever.

Don't know why 'x' happened? Want to know why 'y' happened? Use ProcMon and it will tell you.
Think about using http://www.google.com before posting.

EdT's picture

That's why it is normally present in the application folder

Yes, if you run unwise.exe with an install.log as the argument, all the content in the install.log will be removed. Chances are that the Cyber Armor application uses the same file names in each version, and just updates the file content, as well as using the same install path.
You could, for example, combine the contents of several install.log files into one big file, and nuke a number of apps in one go.

So use it with care!

If your issue has been solved, please use the "Mark as Solution" link on the most relevant thread.