Ghost Solution Suite

I work in support for a software company. I use Ghost (not GSS yet but I hoping to get the upgrade signed off soon) to make our testing hardware as felxible as possible in terms of what operating systems, versions of our product and 3rd party products are loaded.

For our product we have recently started releasing monthly patchsets (collection of fixes a bit like a service pack). I already have an AI package for our application. I create another AI package for the 1st patchset. I then take a new snapshot and create another AI package for the 2nd patchset.

Now if I load the patchsets in order, one by one there is no problem. However, if I create a task to load all the ai packages (select the AI package for the original application, then the first patchset then the 2nd patchset in that order) I would expect the task to load them in the order I select. Unfortunately they do not load in the right order. I did change the location of the actual AI package .exe files and the task ran correctly the first time, but running it again it reverted to loading the AI packages in the wrong order.

Anyone experienced the same or have any suggestions or workarounds?

no takers?

The order at which AI Packages are installed can't be defined. But since the packages can be installed just by running them as an exe file you can script the installation in a predefined order in a batch file. The package files together with the batch file can be transferred to the client machines using file transfer step and then the command execution used to run the batch file that will isntall them.

It's a pitty you cannot control the order but at least I know now. I thought scripting or a batch file might be what I would end up doing. Many thanks for the responce.

BryanMessage was edited by:
Bryan Janes

Also if you specify more than one execute task the order is also not predicable.

I have also had problems with transferring more than one file and then trying to execute one of the batch scripts that were included in the transfer. It seems to try to execute before all of the files are there.

One last thing that we have found if you transfer many files it seems to wait a long time between each file transfer (20 seconds) this might be a GSS 1.0 issue.

Yes I'm still not 100% happy with this but I thought I was going mad. I seemed to get a user hive warning message on some attempts and although the steps for the file transfer and command execution completed sucessfully in the task the packages weren't run.

Also running the packages from a batch file manually promts for a reboot even though there is no reboot command in the ai package when you check it with package builder.

I'm still working on the issue and will update this thread if I can reliably identify the circumstances when the process works sucessfully or not