A tale of bad programming gone awry, and a cautionary tale concerning our future ability to push out software upgrades. I work for a company of 1,800 users and over the past five years my work has included installing and maintaining the companiy's NT domain and Exchange 5.5 system, automating the rollout of the upgrade from Office 97 to Office 2000, and upgrading the NT domain/Exchange 5.5 system to Windows AD and Exchange 2000. Even with that level of experience with Microsoft products (not to mention using pretty much every MS OS since 1983) I was surprised at what I went through this past weekend.
Task at hand: Install Office 2000 SR-1 (the same distribution we used for the Office 2000 rollout at our company). The target: a Dell GX110 with a newly laid-out copy of Windows 2000 Professional fully patched and updated using the Windows Update feature. The installation of Office 2k runs for a while, and then pops up an error message: "Windows File Protection: must copy files from CDROM of SP4. Please insert SP4 disk in CDROM Drive." OK, a fully patched and updated copy of Win2k now includes SP4. With the rollout of SP4 Microsoft has implemented a feature called Windows File Protection, which ostensibly will protect certain system files and DLLs from being overwritten, causing system instability, in theory a laudable goal. Problem number one with this error is that I did not have SP4 on a CDROM because it had been installed using the Windows Update feature. So I go out to Microsoft to download the Network Administrator version of SP4, unzipped it onto my local drive, and burn it to CD. I burn the SP4 files to disc two ways, copying the i386 folder to the root of the disk (so that all required files were at least one folder down) and also burning the contents of the i386 folder to the root (so that all required files were at the root level), not knowing which way the system would try to read these files. Since the installation of the CD burning software required a number of reboots, I was forced to abandon the installation of Office 2000 where it errored out. Not wanting some hosed-up partial install on my new system, I ghosted back to the image I created right before beginning the process (love the Ghost 2003). I start the Office 2000 install process again, get to the error message, and armed with my SP4 CDROM clicked on continue (or whatever), where it refused to recognize my CDROM as acceptable. As you might expect, I am less than pleased. OK, a little research on this Windows File Protection reveals a couple of ways to disable it. Both are registry edits. One disables it for one reboot, and one permanently. Thinking that it may be a useful feature in the future, I disable it temporarily, reboot (again killing the Office 2000 install partway through), and restart the install. Loeth and beholdeth, the install completes fine - no errors, no pause for the CDROM (which was inserted in the drive). Again, not wanting some bastardized uncompleted Office 2k install on my system I re-image back to the pre-install state. I make the registry change to temporarily turn the Windows File Protection off, reboot and restart the Office 2k install. What's this? I get the same error message again. Blood pressure is up, invectives are flying. OK, that's it. I re-image, use the registry editor to permanently kill the Windows File Protection, reboot, check the registry to confirm the kill entry is in place, and go to re-install Office 2k. Same error!! OK, put on the thinking cap. I had one successful Office 2k install. What was different about that attempt? One thing: I had attempted a second install of Office 2k on the same image (no re-image between attempts). To test this theory, I canceled the Office 2k install at the error point, watched it 'undo' whatever it had done, and restarted the install process. Loeth and beholdeth again, the installation process completed successfully (and partway through it started reading the CDROM drive with no problem!). This does not bode well for future software rollouts. Even though we can theoretically disable this Windows File Protection service, telling users 'begin the installation process, wait for the error message, cancel the install and restart it' is lame. Needless to say, Microsoft is not on my A-list this week. Jon Martin Systems Programmer East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) Oakland, CA _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Web Interface: http://intm-dl.sparklist.com/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=exchange&text_mode=&lang=english To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
